Success Story: IMC Assists Furmano Foods with Safety Procedures

Furmano Foods, Inc. grows and produces canned vegetable products. It offers tomato, bean, and vegetable products; and formulates ready to use recipes for salads, stews, puffs, sauces, sliders, pizzas, bocaditos, tacos, soups, chili, appetizers, vegetarian, beef, fish, chicken, and pork products. Furmano, like other producers, provides product for others under other labels as well as occasionally runs product for small batch, specialty products. The company serves customers in various sectors, including foodservice, retail, manufacturing, export, and branded and private labels. Furmano was founded in 1921 and is based in Northumberland, Pennsylvania and employs approximately 350 people with an additional 150 seasonal workers.

Furmano proudly combines state-of-the-art agricultural and manufacturing technology with a kinship to the earth that comes from four generations of farming in this region. They grow most of their tomatoes and vegetables in the fertile Susquehanna River Valley and process millions of cases of tomatoes at their plant in Northumberland. They consider themselves stewards of the land and are sensitive to ecological concerns employing farming techniques that are environmentally friendly as well as safe for the surrounding community. Many in the Furmano organization grew up and still live in the area, so they strive to be good corporate citizens and a positive contributor.

Responding to an inquiry by Furmano regarding organizational safety assessments and establishing a new safety culture, IMC met with the company to discuss possible options. In addition to Furmano’s leadership team, IMC Business Advisor Rick Terry brought in trusted IMC third-party consultant, Scott Witmer of EMS Consulting to the site visit as a subject matter expert. In addition to safety objectives, the overall business climate of the organization was discussed. While production growth wasn’t the focus of this meeting, future proactive challenges and opportunities were discussed regarding organizational culture, specifically around safety. There are some issues that the leadership team wants to address before they grow into major concerns and become detrimental to production.

EMS Consulting worked with Furmano to address safety culture and procedures. Scott presented his experiences regarding organizational development and safety protocols to the team as well as the challenges of establishing a new culture of safety in an existing organization. Scott engaged Furmano leadership in the various areas of safety and safety management to begin to gauge the current state of the organization and where they wanted to go with it. The objective was to ensure that Furmano’s maintenance personnel and, where applicable, operators, have appropriate, accurate, written procedures to ensure their safety when cleaning, prepping, or maintaining each machine. The IMC proposed to do this by understanding the hazards, the procedures to be used to avoid those hazards and how to remove locks and / or tags to ensure their safety and those nearby.  Also, clearly documenting this information in a Furmano approved format so the procedures can be used effectively to ensure worker safety and OSHA compliance.

The deliverables to achieve the project objectives included:

• appropriately documenting each LOTO procedure for effective use by Furmano’s personnel
• evaluation of these procedures to ensure they are clear, effective representations of the procedure to follow to be safe when working on the machine.
• providing onsite advice utilizing IMC’s SME during the assessment of the current state of safety protocols
• written procedures, including photographs finalized for use by Furmano personnel

Assessment of the plant equipment and existing LOTO procedures began in early December 2022 and culminated with final documentation submitted to Furmano leadership in June 2023. Based on both a walkthrough of the facility and a review of the existing LOTO records, EMS estimated what equipment in each section of the production facility would require review and procedural documentation. Furmano leadership selected the main production area, approximately 32 LOTO procedures, as the first area to address.

During the work assessing and developing the LOTO procedures, it became evident to the IMC team and Furmano that equipment labeling and posting of LOTO procedures were nearly non-existent. IMC worked with onsite Furmano maintenance support to make sure they concurred on the procedures as the best solutions for the equipment. Trouble spots were identified by missing or broken handles, and other signs of required Preventative Maintenance (PM) were noted throughout the process. The response by Furmano to repair or replace any deficiencies was handled with diligence and completed prior to the end of the project. The overall project resulted in visibility of the LOTO procedures through equipment labeling and posting of the procedures at each location, safer overall environment for all employees, and better coordination between safety and the PM departments. In addition, the established procedures enabled better training resources for safety and PM training in the future.