Toyota Forklifts & Reddy Ice

Announcer: The idea of something being frozen in the supply chain is not usually a good thing. We normally like to see things kept fluid but in the case of the nation’s largest manufacturer of commercial ice, frozen is the ideal state.

This is the Denver production and distribution facility for Reddy Ice, a company that manufacturers ice at 68 facilities across 32 states. Denver is one if its newest facilities. At 50,000 square feet it includes an ice production area, a freezer storage vault, and a loading dock.

Reddy Ice relies on Toyota forklifts and pallet jacks to move ice within all of its facilities nationwide. The company had previously used another lift truck brand but switched to Toyota forklifts because of their quality and dependability. Also, because Toyota’s extensive and experienced dealer network matches up well for servicing and maintaining the vehicles.

Joey Tasher: We’re converting all of our units to Toyota. We chose Toyota because of their vast distribution aspects. They have facilities nationwide that really proved to fit better for us.

Announcer: Reddy Ice, as a corporation, wanted a single point of contact to manage forklift needs and since Reddy Ice is headquartered in Dallas, Texas the Dallas area Toyota forklift dealer, Shoppas Material Handling, became their primary supplier. Shoppas coordinates the 800 pieces of Toyota equipment that Reddy Ice now uses within its network and it works with the local Toyota forklift dealers across all 68 of Reddy Ice’s Locations to service and maintain the equipment.

Jason Bratton: Toyota and Reddy Ice Have partnered to provide material handling equipment throughout their facilities all across North America. We’ve helped standardize them on the Toyota product, making sure they have the right piece of equipment for their application. It’s been a great relationship so far.

Announcer: The Denver facility Reaches customers throughout Colorado as well as parts of Wyoming and New Mexico. Those customers include convenience stores, supermarkets, commercial ice users, and airlines. The ice on this truck will fill the drinks of passengers departing today from Denver International Airport.

Work starts early here as the first delivery trucks leave the facility at about five in the morning. That means that ice has to be ready by then for loading.

Manufacturing commercial ice is just a bit more complicated than how we all make ice cubes at home. First, city water is sent through a water softener, a carbon filter, then reverse osmosis, and finally a UV filter. The filtered water is frozen using these large tanks cooled by liquid ammonia. The formed ice is cut into cubes, which are deposited in this storage bin located within the facility’s very large freezer, known as the vault. The temperature in here is a chilly 18°F.

The next step is to bring the cubed ice from the vault for packaging into 5, 10, and 20 pounds plastic bags. The 10 pound bag is the most popular size. The bagged ice is palletized and a Toyota forklift picks up the ice and loads it onto a pallet conveyor. The ice then conveys to a door on the wall of the very large freezer vault. Inside the vault a light illuminates alerting a forklift driver, working with in those chilly conditions, that a pallet is ready for pickup. He opens the door, gathers the load off of the conveyor, and takes it to floor storage where the pallets are stacked several high. The ice will remain in the vault for only a short time before being loaded onto trucks for customer delivery.

This Toyota electric forklift is one of two in Denver equipped with a cascade single double fork attachment so it is able to handle two pallets at a time. The pallets are taken directly from the vault and loaded onto trailers and delivery trucks. The two pallets barely fit through the trailer opening with the single double forks but loading this way is twice as fast. An important consideration when your inventory could simply melt away.

Electric pallet jacks are also used to load trailers. The electric pallet jacks often do double duty here as some of them ride along inside of the trailers so that they are available to expedite delivery upon reaching the customer site. The pallets are simply unloaded from the truck and driven directly into customer storage areas. That’s much easier than carrying individual bags of ice. Even though, they must work in frigid conditions the Toyota forklifts have proven to be up to the task.

Joey Tasher: They have reacted very well to the cold environment as well as to the different effects of in and out of a freezer. Toyota is very reliable, your products are very strong, and provide us the ability to really complete our job in an effective manner.