With 90 years as a Southeastern staple, Carolina Foods has a long legacy of producing Duchess honey buns, GEM mini doughnuts and pastries for retailers across North America.

But a sticky situation has developed at the company’s 100,000-sq.-ft. bakery on South Tryon Street in the South End neighborhood of Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s out of space.

“The problem is, the land in the South End of Charlotte is maxed out,” says CEO Dan Myers. “We could not put in another operation, another line – nothing. The thesis had to include building a new, state-of-the-art bakery.”

Falfurrias Capital Partners acquired Carolina Foods from its founders, the Scarborough family, in 2021 with the commitment to build a new plant. Through a multiyear effort engaging many partners, the company has opened a 425,000-sq.-ft., fully automated bakery and packaging facility in the Charlotte suburb of Pineville.

Designed to improve upon the limitations at its original bakery, Carolina Foods’ new facility is FOOD ENGINEERING’s 2025 Plant of the Year.

“It just accentuates all of the hard work the full team has put in since we broke ground in August 2022,” Rebecca Babyak, director of continuous improvement, says about the award. “It’s very rewarding for the team to see the recognition that we’re doing something big.”

Site Location and Partner Collaboration

Carolina Foods explored several locations before selecting the site in Pineville, but the company was determined to remain in the Charlotte area. Carolina Foods considered existing buildings since it wasn’t necessarily interested in a build-to-suit facility at the time, but the 40-acre parcel in Pineville’s Carolina Logistics Park — developed by Beacon Partners — offered the company an opportunity to transform the site to fit its needs.

“We thought it was the perfect site for us to build the size of facility we needed, have ample parking and enough room to expand the building in the future if we needed to,” Myers says.

Sandwiched between Interstate 77 and Interstate 485, the location is 10 miles southwest of Carolina Foods’ original bakery, making it ideal for logistics and employee retention. Nearly all of the company’s employees said they were willing and able to commute to the Pineville facility.

“We have tremendous team members and employees, and we wanted to make sure that wherever we ended up, the large majority of our team members could commute there,” Myers says. “There is a lot of institutional knowledge with our team members.”

Carolina Foods partnered with Cushman & Wakefield for real estate brokerage services, as well as project management. The company also tapped Stellar Group for architecture and engineering services, while Whiting-Turner served as general contractor for constructing the facility’s core and shell and the bakery upfit.

Myers says the project required – and still requires – close collaboration between all of Carolina Foods’ partners since the company refuses to disrupt customer service while construction is ongoing and business is growing.

“Operating two bakeries during construction adds complexity to our business and requires critical planning to deliver high-quality products at industry-best service levels,” says Stuart Smith, chief operations officer.

The company broke ground at the Pineville site in August 2022. Carolina Foods was well into its bakery upfit when Beacon Partners turned over the core and shell in June 2023. The company’s first honey bun line became operational in March 2024.

Plant and Process Design

When it came to plant design, Carolina Foods started with its processes and developed the building’s core and shell around them. The company took learnings from its South Tryon site to define exactly what “state-of-the-art” would mean for production and to the Carolina Foods team.

For example, a tight operational footprint required the company to fit its equipment into the original bakery the best way it could – which meant occupying multiple levels. However, at the Pineville facility, each honey bun and doughnut production process is linear.

“We knew Point A to Point B, the most efficient way is a straight line,” Smith says. “We knew we didn’t want to be on two levels. We wanted to have a clear line of sight. We’re a continuous flow operation, so that lends itself to better management of the workforce and of the product quality.”

Additionally, Carolina Foods opted to elevate its utilities so the majority of the piping would exist above a hung ceiling, rather than around the production floor. Pipes delivering compressed air and bulk ingredients, as well as conduits delivering electricity, still extend down to manufacturing areas.

“It’s a very clean look,” Myers says. “We wanted to have a processing area that we could control the environment and we could also clean the environment very well. That was the essence of why we designed it the way we did. The whole thing is washdown if you want it to be.”

Carolina Foods also bolstered its frying capabilities, closing off Moline electric fryers in negative-pressure rooms with stainless steel walls and ceilings for greater control over temperature, energy usage, and dough resting and rising processes.

“By putting walls around, we allow inside the fryer room to be under negative air pressure and outside the fryer room to be under positive air pressure,” Myers says. “We want the large majority of our processing area to be under positive air and the fryer rooms to be under negative air for the exhaust. If you don’t wall them off, you can’t do that.”

The company also designed employee welfare facilities that allow the workforce to rest and gather, but also to control the flow of people from the ingredient side of the plant to the finished product side.

Additionally – given the size of the facility – Carolina Foods created a smaller, air-conditioned breakroom under a production-area mezzanine to save the employees time and walking distance.

“That transit time – that’s time away from the line,” Myers says. “We were doing it for practical reasons, but also convenience reasons for our team members.”

The mezzanine’s top floor houses Carolina Foods’ expanded food safety and quality team, allowing closer access to the production floor. The company earned a perfect score on its first Safe Quality Food (SQF) audit for the Pineville facility.

Equipment

To outfit the bakery with processing equipment, the company had several suppliers in mind.

“We thought, we’re going to differentiate ourselves by the quality product we make, in particular, the scale at which we’re making it and then the automation,” Myers says.

Carolina Foods turned to the Fred D. Pfening Company for a fully automated ingredient handling system that includes bulk handling capabilities and liquid and granular silos at the rear of the facility. This was crucial, Smith says, since Carolina Food’s South Tryon bakery requires manual handling of 50-lb. bags.

Pfening also provided an industrial sugar mill to allow Carolina Foods to grind its own powdered sugar on-site. As for flour, it’s sifted by Great Western Manufacturing orbital sifters before it’s blended with minor ingredients and pneumatically delivered to mixers.

For its honey bun line, Carolina Foods installed Peerless mixers, where dough is developed and allowed to rest so the yeast activates. Once rested, the dough travels through a Peerless dough handling system and then to a Moline Machinery sheeting line, where honey buns are formed and cut to a precise thickness by a guillotine.

The honey buns then enter a proofer before heading to the walled-off fryer. The new fryer rooms also feature Oberlin circulating oil filtration systems that allow Carolina Foods to continuously fry honey buns and doughnuts longer without unplanned downtime to regulate free fatty acids. After frying, I.J. White spirals and RexFab conveyors allow the honey buns to cool before glaze is applied by an MG Newell waterfall glazer.

The process is similar for Carolina Foods’ GEM doughnuts. Topos Mondial integrated mixers feed a Unifiller dough pump system. Moline fryers, I.J. White spirals and RexFab conveyors deliver doughnuts either to a Topos Mondial sugar tumbling system or a Sollich chocolate enrobing and cooling system.

Carolina Foods focused on automation for its packaging processes. The company tapped Schubert for a high-speed, robot-based packaging system for its honey buns. The system, which integrates primary and secondary packaging into one streamlined process, flow-wraps honey buns and then packs them into cartons.

A spiral cooling belt brings honey buns into the Schubert packaging system, while a spreading belt separates incoming products for vision technology that detects product position and orientation. This information is fed to a robot that has a specially designed gripper tool that accommodates eight product sizes and ensures gentle product handling. A Flowmodul wraps individual honey buns before they are conveyed through a Mettler Toledo metal detector and checkweigher.

Four streams of wrapped products are fed into a tray packer. Schubert’s robots build trays and place wrapped honey buns into the trays. Once loading is complete, each tray is closed, pulled off the transport system and placed on a discharge belt for palletization.

Smith points to the small footprint of the Schubert system, which helped in designing the packaging process.

“That only helps solve a lot of other issues that you don’t realize until you’re laying stuff out in AutoCAD and you don’t have the same flexibility that we enjoy today because the footprint is so small and does so much in a tiny space,” he says.

For GEM doughnuts, Carolina Foods turned to Netherlands-based Royal Houdijk for the GEMBot, a vision-guided, robotic pick-and-place system that allows the company to fill doughnut sleeves. Special grippers build rows of doughnuts that are then fed into an SPS wrapper.

This installation represents the first time that this Houdijk system has been applied to doughnuts, Myers says.

“The technology isn’t new – it was just new to our industry,” he says. “They have been using it on cookies and other products for a very long time. It was proven technology now applied to doughnuts.”

What’s Next

After commissioning three production lines in 2024, Carolina Foods plans to commission three more this year and one more in the first quarter of 2026. Construction is expected to wrap in the first part of next year, when all of Carolina Foods’ operations will exist under one roof.

The Carolina Foods team agrees that the effort has been worth it for the company’s team members and for developing and strengthening customer relationships.

“It's very exciting working at Carolina Foods, growing rapidly, hiring new team members and implementing new technologies," Smith says. "Our team members see the investment. They see the long-term commitment every day when they come to work."