Hundreds of lids for chocolate ice cream churn in a metal bin as they're scooped up by a conveyor belt at Turkey Hill Dairy near Conestoga.

About 50 per minute are pressed down on cartons of ice cream along each of the five lines in the plant, enough cartons and lids to empty two to three semitruckloads of packaging materials a day.

On the other side of the plant, other machines are filling plastic bottles with milk and sweetened tea in a stream of production that goes on practically around the clock.

Similar scenes take place every day at numerous food-processing and manufacturing plants across Lancaster County — at Pepperidge Farm, Mars Snackfood, Hershey's Y&S Candies, Nissin Foods, Kellogg, RR Donnelley, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline, to name just a few.

"Packaging technology is basically an industry within an industry," said Scott Sheely, executive director of the Lancaster County Workforce Investment Board, the agency that is heading up a 10-county effort to find ways to improve the region's packaging capability.

Packaging is already one the region's strengths and one of the reasons there are so many manufacturers here, Sheely said.

"We want to try to make the competitive advantage we have here so great the companies that are here want to stay and other companies want to come here," he said.

The 18-month planning effort is being funded through a $250,000 regional innovation grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Work on the project began in earnest last month when an 11-member steering committee attended a government training session in Chicago.

In addition to Sheely's agency, the project includes the Berks County and South-Central Workforce Investment Boards, along with their economic-development partners and skills-training centers.

The effort, Sheely said, is in part an outgrowth of the Lancaster Prospers initiative to establish this area as a "center of excellence" in packaging.

Sheely said he expects to see some things to begin before the planning has been completed.

"We intend to have a forum for people in the supply chain, probably next fall," he said. "We want to share information about packaging so they know it's being done on their behalf."

Other efforts will grow out of the study itself.

"We want to look at the supply chain and try to identify what things are being satisfied within the region and what outside the region," Sheely said.

One possibility, he said, would be the local manufacture of packaging machinery, currently concentrated in Europe.

"We're one of the areas that do have a lot of machine-building capability," Sheely said. "One of the questions on the table is: could we reinvent the machine-building industry and make it competitive?"

Case in point
Off one truck dock at Turkey Hill Dairy is a long storage area stacked with corrugated boxes filled with ice-cream cartons and lids.

The area is emptied every day as the cartons and lids are fed into Turkey Hill's ice-cream production lines, and then it's filled again as trucks roll in from the Huhtamaki plant in Fulton, N.Y., near Lake Ontario.

Huhtamaki is a Finnish company with plants in 36 countries, including 11 in the United States.

The company makes the equipment that fills the ice cream cartons as well as supplying the cartons and lids themselves, said Ernie Pinckney, Turkey Hill's special-projects coordinator.

Turkey Hill chose Huhtamaki as its packaging supplier several years ago based on its ability to meet Turkey Hill's just-in-time requirements, he said.

And since Turkey Hill usually fills those cartons within 24 hours, the trucks have to keep rolling in on time.

By contrast, the plastic bottles used on the "fluid" side of the plant are manufactured nearby, the smaller containers in Chester County and the larger ones in York County, Pinckney said.

This is the kind of scenario that Sheely wants to look at in the grant project.

"One of the things that we will be asking in our supply-chain study is: could there be a local company that might be able to compete with Huhtamaki if the conditions were right?" Sheely said.

The workers
The grant project will also focus on finding ways to improve training for the people who operate and maintain packaging machinery.

"If you want to have excellence, you have to have skilled workers," Sheely said. You have to have "a pipeline from school to work."

Manufacturing workers have long had mechanical and electrical skills, he said. But the high-tech equipment they're now operating also requires electronic and software skills.

The people who provide industrial training call this new combination of skills "mechatronics."

The three workforce investment boards have already made significant strides, working with earlier state and federal grants to set up a nationally certified 200-hour mechatronics training program at Reading Area Community College.

That program has been extended to the high school level through the Lancaster County Career and Technology Center.

Students who complete the certification program are eligible for nine hours of academic credit at Reading Area Community College.

Part of the current grant will be used to explore ways to encourage other colleges to offer credit for the certification course and to expand mechatronics training to the bachelor's degree level, Sheely said.

The payoff
With more and more industries moving operations to foreign countries, the long-term stakes are high.

"To me, it's a borderline crisis," Sheely said. "We have big manufacturers saying, 'Are we going to be able to be here in 10 years?' "

The only way to compete with low-wage staffing abroad, he said, is to have high-tech automation and skilled workers who can operate the machinery.

David Nikoloff, president of the Economic Development Co. of Lancaster County, agrees.

"It's not a sexy thing — to put things in bags — but we think Scott [Sheely] is on to something," he said.

Nikoloff said his agency sees recurrent patterns when trying to attract new companies to Lancaster County.

"A lot of location decisions will go: Does the area have the capacity and the people?" Nikoloff said. "It's a recurring theme, 'Can we get the people with the skills to run our plant?' "

Having an enhanced capability in packaging, he said, and people trained to work on that machinery will provide a positive answer to those questions.

"That will keep and attract new companies to an area," Nikoloff said.

---

Dennis Larison is editor of the Business section and can be reached by telephone at 291-8753 or by e-mail at dlarison@lnpnews.com.