Quincy's packaging automation story starts in 1925, when a Quincy drugstore owner in the Wollaston section bought a small corner soda fountain and built it into the country's first nationwide restaurant chain, growing to more than 170 locations by the 1940s. A 170-location restaurant chain and a 5,000-pound-an-hour pasta plant both grew out of the same appetite for scale, and Quincy still runs the plant that proves it: a USDA-certified frozen and IQF pasta manufacturer and food co-packer has operated from a Water Street plant since 1967, turning out roughly 5,000 pounds of product an hour for retail and foodservice customers. Quincy is also corporate home to one of the Northeast's largest supermarket chains, a nearly 365-store operation, which keeps the city on the radar for regional grocery and CPG distribution even though the stores themselves sit elsewhere.

We build Mars Series vertical form-fill-seal (VFFS) baggers and EliteWeigh multihead weighers around that kind of frozen and IQF product, matching fill accuracy to pasta shapes and portion sizes that a co-packer needs to hold within a strict weight tolerance. You know the pasta shape you're running. We hold the fill weight on it. A frozen-food operation running 5,000 pounds an hour cannot afford a scale that drifts mid-shift or a bagger that jams on an IQF product's irregular shape. A case study in our portfolio covers a food producer scaling up automated production the same way. A plant running 5,000 pounds an hour has no room in the schedule for equipment that still needs building once it lands on the floor. We ship these units already integrated, ready to run. When South Shore and Greater Boston food manufacturers walk our solutions team through the fill weight and pack format they already run, we size the multihead-weighing and VFFS equipment to match, not a generic spec built for a different product.