Turntable lifts reduce injuries at food plant

Mission Foods Corp. is the U.S. branch of the Mexican Gruma Corp., a worldwide leader in corn flour and tortilla production. In the company’s 13 U.S. facilities, about 500 of Mission’s 4,000 employees manually load pallets. By deploying a number of ergonomic lifts, the company has seen a significant reduction in injuries.

Packed with bags of product, each tote can weigh as much as 40 pounds. Workers stack the containers six layers high on pallets. Before installing the new lifts (Southworth Products, southworthproducts.com), stacking the lower layers of totes required a lot of bending, and at every layer, the employees carried full totes around the pallet as needed. Workers would sometimes lose balance when a foot slipped between the slats or off the edge of these pallets. Too often, the outcome was a broken or seriously sprained ankle. More common, and more likely to require surgery, were twisted knees. Other injuries included strained backs from repetitive lifting and torso twisting.

“The issue was cost,” explains Tom Davis, safety manager for Mission Foods. “I felt strongly that the lifts would be worth it from a safety standpoint alone, but I told management that the long-term savings would go beyond medical expenses because the lifts would make pallet-loading so much easier. We’ve now seen a decrease in injuries, overtime and turnover somewhere in the ballpark of 50% at those positions.”

Davis had previously considered purchasing some kind of lift to facilitate pallet loading at his home plant in Dallas and at other Mission Foods facilities, but he knew he would need to put together a persuasive cost-benefit analysis. “At that time, every lift I’d heard of had to be recessed,” Davis recalls. “That meant digging a pit in the concrete floor so the platform could go low enough for the full pallets to be removed with the manual pallet jacks we use in most of our plants.”

The new lifts sit at floor level, rotate by hand, and are compatible with hand trucks. The platform has a capacity of 2,500 pounds. An electric motor drives the hydraulic pump that raises the platform when the operator steps on the “up” pedal. Descent halts if someone’s foot enters any of the photoelectric “toe-guard” beams around the base of the unit.

“When it is all done by hand, loading pallets all day long is a hard job,” says Davis. “We had a lot of people quit, whether they hurt themselves or not. But once we made the job easy enough and employees stayed for a while, we stopped seeing the injuries that typically happened within the first six weeks to two months of employment.”