Whittier grew up along a rail spur built in 1887 to move packed citrus out of the San Gabriel Valley and onto national markets, and that packing heritage is exactly why PLAN IT brings packaging automation to the city's food producers today. By 1906, growers were shipping about 650 carloads of oranges and 250 carloads of lemons out of Whittier every year. Then came the walnuts. Planted starting in 1887, they turned the valley into the country's largest walnut-growing region, layering nut packing on top of the citrus trade. If your Whittier-area line still portions nuts, dried fruit, or snacks by hand, PLAN IT's EliteFill auger fillers and EliteWeigh multihead weighers do it by weight instead, and our RotoBagger premade-pouch machines and Mars Series VFFS lines bag it at production speed.

World War II ended that packing-town era: returning veterans needed housing, the orange groves were subdivided, and hospitals and school districts are now Whittier's largest employers rather than packing houses. The problem those groves solved by hand, getting fruit and nuts weighed, bagged, and shipped without spoilage or shortage, hasn't disappeared; it has moved to food and snack producers across the wider San Gabriel Valley. The old packing houses never had equipment that could weigh, bag, and case fruit and nuts at today's volumes; PLAN IT's lines do. Our case-packing and inspection equipment, detailed on our VFFS and case-packer category pages, rounds out that line. PLAN IT covers more ground than a single packing house did. The California locations page maps the rest of the state's network, the food and beverage industry page lists the producer types we equip, and the case study plus solutions overview show a nut-and-snack operation running the same equipment at volume.