This article is sponsored and written by Formic.
ALTA Foods has been at the forefront of automation for a long time. The 18-year-old tortilla manufacturer has embraced automation as a way to boost throughput, reduce labor strain, and keep up with growing demand from major retailers.
In fact, much of ALTA’s production line, from mixing to bagging, is already fully automated, making ALTA a standout in a niche industry where few have embraced technology this deeply.
But Don Barnes, President of ALTA Foods, saw untapped potential further down the production line.
Moving Beyond the Bottleneck: Looking at the End of Line
With four production lines running 24 hours a day, five days a week, ALTA has a well-oiled production line, from mixing ingredients to bagging tortillas, but downstream, operations are still very manual. Case packing and palletizing still rely heavily on manual labor, requiring up to four workers per line.
For Barnes, the decision to automate further was driven by more than just efficiency. The end-of-line process had become a bottleneck, not only for production but also for staffing.
By automating case packing and palletizing, Barnes explained, they could shift from a process requiring four employees doing a lot of manual labor to two employees monitoring machinery and making sure it’s running smoothly, while freeing up those two additional resources to be redeployed to more critical tasks in the facility.
“They can spend more time talking about their kids and what they are doing this weekend while monitoring the machines, instead of manually working really hard,” he said.
Eliminating Turnover with End of Line Automation
At ALTA Foods, every decision is strategic and made to benefit both employees and how the company operates to deliver for customers. When ALTA hires a new production line employee, they often start at the palletizing station, but they usually don’t stay there for long. “That’s what made us realize we need to automate this production step,” he said.
Barnes recognized that palletizing was a high-turnover position due to how manual it was, and for a company supplying major retailers on tight timelines, that kind of churn is a major risk. Every time ALTA had to rehire an employee to palletize boxes, it took valuable time, money, and resources to onboard and retrain each new employee. But turnover didn’t just cost time and money — it slowed down production, created knowledge gaps, and forced constant retraining.
Now, the company is partnering with Formic to automate palletizing quickly to eliminate downtime due to retraining.
“With Formic, it didn’t even come down to the cost of those employees palletizing,” Barnes said. “It’s that those 12 palletizing jobs are getting turned over four times a year, which is 60 people. We take 120 applications to hire 60 to 100 people. We drug test 60 people. We onboard 60 people. We train 60 people. What is the cost of not those 12 people, but those 60 people every year?”
But automating the palletizing processes isn’t about lowering labor costs by getting rid of employees. ALTA emphasized that it’s about job transformation, not elimination.
“We’re not getting rid of anybody,” he said. “Already, once employees prove they can [palletize] and show initiative, we often want to move them somewhere else because we have a lot of jobs that are more important.”
By the end of this summer, the company will have automated palletizing, and by early 2026, automated case packing, reducing manual labor, improving consistency, and opening up more skilled opportunities for existing employees.
Why ALTA Turned to Full Service Automation vs. Buying Equipment
Historically, ALTA has purchased and managed their own automation equipment. But when it came time to automate palletizing, they decided to take a different approach.
ALTA has several strategic capital projects on the roadmap for the coming years. Formic’s Full Service Automation made it possible to automate without any upfront CapEx requirements, freeing ALTA up to spend it elsewhere to execute their future plans. For Barnes, switching from purchasing to a yearly contract wasn’t just about saving capital; it was about staying flexible and getting guaranteed outcomes.
“I’m convinced that if there’s a problem, Formic will fix it and make it right,” Barnes said. “Formic will make it work so we can focus on other things.”
Full Service Automation allows ALTA to stay focused on what it does best: making high-quality tortillas instead of spending valuable time managing robots.
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