Inside Krispy Kreme’s Automation Upgrade

We’ll be looking at how Krispy Kreme is modernizing its production machinery to save costs, improve worker safety, and enable remote monitoring of its equipment. To start, it’s important to realize that Krispy Kreme is not just a doughnut maker, it also manufactures the equipment used in its store to make the doughnuts. In fact, the company’s headquarters in North Carolina features a manufacturing facility that houses research, design, testing, engineering, and production operations. The machines and processing equipment built there use Siemens drives and controls, integrated by ThinkPLC, the automation engineering consultant to Krispy Kreme. Bobby Cole, president of ThinkPLC, says the doughnut making process at Krispy Kreme requires very precise controls to keep the shortening the doughnuts are fried in within an exact temperature range and then move them through a specific cooling process.