Ultra Series Cooler at Carolina Foods, Pineville, NC
An I.J. White cooling tower cools GEM mini doughnuts before they’re tumbled in powdered sugar or enrobed in chocolate. Image courtesy of Carolina Foods
Carolina Foods
FOOD ENGINEERING’s 2025 Plant of the Year
Sweet Success: How Carolina Foods Drives Growth with Automation
Excerpt from April 2025 Food Engineering by Alyse Thompson-Richards
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.
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.
Honey buns travel through Carolina Foods’ electric fryer, which has been closed off in a separate room to maintain negative pressure. Photo by Alyse Thompson-Richards
GEM doughnuts travel through an electric fryer. Photo by Alyse Thompson-Richards
CA Schubert pick-and-place machine packs honey buns. Photo by Alyse Thompson-Richards
GEM mini doughnuts are flipped into frying oil that is filtered by an Oberlin circulating filtration system, allowing the line to run for longer without unplanned downtime to regulate free fatty acids. Photo by Alyse Thompson-Richards
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.
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
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Sweet Success: How Carolina Foods Drives Growth with Automation | Food Engineering