Photos: Take a sneak peek inside Kwik Trip's massive food production lines
In its stores, Kwik Trip customers may see baskets of muffins, a cooler with white and chocolate milk and a case that holds salads and sandwiches. But on a 120-acre corporate campus in La Crosse, food production is measured in the millions. Here's a look inside Kwik Trip's production machine.
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Workers package cake doughnuts as they come off the conveyor belts in the Kwik Trip sweets bakery. The bakery in 2018 produced a combined 106 million doughnuts and Glazers.
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Containers of Nature's Touch ice cream are filled on the production line in the Kwik Trip dairy plant in La Crosse.
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Milk trucks arrive daily at the Kwik Trip dairy from farms in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. In 2018, the facility produced 26 million gallons of milk and 3.4 million containers of ice cream.
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Workers move completed orders to trucks to be sent to the distribution center.
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Crates of milk are stacked in the dairy plant warehouse waiting to be pulled for orders to individual stores. The dairy produced 59.5 million units of milk, juice and ice cream in 2018.
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M&M cookies cool off on a while riding on a conveyor belt before packaging.
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Half-gallon jugs go through a label machine in the Kwik Trip dairy.
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Cake doughnuts are flipped as they move through the deep fryer in the sweets bakery at the Kwik Trip corporate campus in La Crosse. The sweets bakery in 2018 produced more than 67 million doughnuts and nearly 39 million Glazers. It also baked 41,883,081 cookies.
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The Kwik Trip kitchen in La Crosse is a hive of activity where sandwiches, burritos, pizza, soup and snack cups are produced. In 2018, workers assembled 1.9 million salads. Due to continued growth by the company, the kitchen is in line to be more than doubled in size by next year, while other production facilities there have recently been or are planned for further upgrades.
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Orange juice rolls off the production line in the Kwik Trip dairy.
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The Kwik Trip kitchen in La Crosse produces a wide range of food products like sandwiches, burritos, cheese packages and soups and has an automated pizza line that can produce 50,000 pizzas a day.
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Hot dog buns move off the production line toward a cutting machine in Kwik Trip's new bread and bun bakery in La Crosse. The 198,000-square-foot facility that cost $113 million to build employs 125 people and opened in November.
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Fresh baked bread and buns are organized by computer and automatically picked by a gantry system based on a specific store's need. With 670 stores in three states, the bread and bun bakery is a busy place.
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Pam Socia uses an injector to fill Long Johns with a butter cream filling.
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The ice cream prduction room at the Kwik Trp Dairy.
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Justin Adams loads a pallet of Nature's Touch ice cream for shipping.
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Muffins cool in racks until they are ready to be packaged.
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A worker in the Kwik Trip bread and bun bakery watches pans of hamburger bun dough to make sure they are full and the dough is centered in the trays.
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The bottling room at the Kwik Trip dairy.
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Long John doughnuts are flipped as they move through the deep fryer.
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Loaves of bread move out of the oven.
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Loaves of bread move down the line to be put into trays and sent out.
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Ray Monroe, the director of the KT Kitchens, talks about their focus wall.
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Pans of hamberger buns move from the proofer to the ovens.
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Crates of orange juice waiting to be put away in the warehouse.
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Bread and buns sit in an automated picking system before put onto trucks for delivery.
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Trays of buns and bread are moved to where they will wait to be sent to the distribution center.
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Half gallon jugs of Cinnamon Hazelnut creamer get filled in the Kwik Trip dairy.
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Richard Johnson adds ingredients for the Nature's Touch Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream into a mixer.
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Coney buns head for cutting and packaging.
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Al Bollinger performs a quality test on a freshly packaged container of Nature's Touch ice cream. Bollinger checks to make sure the ingredients are properly mixed as well as checking the flavor.
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Cookies a packaged and then sent to the labeler.
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Dough is formed into the shape of Long Johns and sent into a proofer.
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Kwik Trip workers assemble salads in the Kwik Trip kitchen.
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A forklift operator moves crates of orange juice around the warehouse at the Kwik Trip dairy.
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Pam Socia uses an injector to fill Long Johns with a butter cream filling.
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Hamberger buns are inspected as they come out of the oven.
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A package of coney buns goes through a machine to tie the bag.
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Bret Roedel checks samples of cookies to insure consistency.
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Long John doughnuts are filled with butter cream frosting.
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