IEN Magazine: Made In America

 

Based in Columbus, Wis., Lyco Manufacturing makes some of the best commercial food processing machinery in the world. The equipment has peeled every potato that became a potato chip or french fry, every onion that has been sliced or diced, nearly every vegetable that’s canned or frozen, and had a hand in processing most of the chicken that reaches your table. Oh, and they do about 132 million beans per year.

The company was founded by Dave Zittel in 1979, but it wasn’t always an easy road. He started out with a company that made stainless vacuum pumps for the dairy industry, but about six months after he bought the company, the product failed and life was tough for Zittel and his family.

In 1983, he sold the dairy pump line and stumbled upon an opportunity to build a new potato peeler. An engineer by trade, Zittel designed it, manufactured it, and was back in business.

For the past 36 years, he’s built more than 350 potato peelers, but that wasn’t the biggest seller. Two years after the peeler, Zittel designed a new blancher cooker for the canning industry, and has gone on to sell more than 750 of them around the world.

IEN Magazine, Feb 2020

DO YOU HAVE QUESTIONS?

COVID-19 Statement

March 23, 2020

Dear Valued Customer:

Lyco Manufacturing, Inc. is working diligently to maintain our productivity at 100% capacity to meet your needs. We realize we have an obligation to support all of our customers that are doing their utmost to Feed the World in these uncertain times.

Lyco’s belief of Providing a Safe Work Environment, with a Quality Product, On Time and at a Profit along with our beliefs in God, Family, People and Business in that Order have been a tremendously effective guide for us during this crisis.

A few of the actions we have taken to ensure the safety of our associates are:

  • We stopped all airline travel.
  • We have limited work related automobile travel to “essential” travel as we evaluate each trip prior to dispatching our associates.
  • We have split our manufacturing workforce into 3 shifts to enhance social distancing.
  • We have implemented a work from home effort, currently many of our associates are working from home.
  • Of course, we have implemented all the hygiene standards as recommended by the CDC.
  • Procurement is working with all of our vendors to assure we can receive the required components to meet our production needs.

As you all know the situation changes minute by minute as we continue to monitor and adapt our plan to meet those challenges while maintaining our goal to maintain full production to meet your needs.

With the uncertainty of the situation we are asking our customer to help us, help you by streamlining the Process.

  1. If we have a Master Supply Agreement, it is our intent to use those agreement for Purchase Order T&C with the understanding that this is a time to look at Delay Clause and Force Marjorie clauses.
  2. With any order we will provide you with expected shipping dates, but they cannot be guaranteed because of world conditions and we’ll inform you immediately if anything changes.
  3. In 2019 Lyco reviewed our Standard Terms of Sale to make them fair to both parties. It is our request that if you do not have a Master Supply Agreement with Lyco that we abide by the Lyco Terms of Sale as this will reduce the administration time of negotiating complex Terms and Conditions.

Thank you for your assistance on this matter and please feel free to contact me if you have any concerns.

William Zittel | President

Download the Lyco COVID-19 Statement

COVID-19 Essential Business Statement

March 23, 2020

Dear Valued Customer:

In increasing measure, governmental authorities are issuing stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders for citizens, requiring closures of “non-essential” businesses, while ensuring that “essential” businesses remain open to properly and effectively respond to the COVID-19 emergency.

Under Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ authority, the Wisconsin Secretary of the Department of Health Services issued Emergency Order #12, “Safer at Home Order.” (See https://evers.wi.gov/documents/covid19/emo12-saferathome.pdf)

Under that order, in Section 13, the order exempts from its restrictions “Essential Businesses and Operations” which include, (under subsection 13.a) businesses and workers which are included on the CISA list. (See U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Memorandum on Identification of Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers During COVID-19 Response, updated March 23, 2020.

Lyco Manufacturing, Inc. (“Lyco”) is an employer engaged in the manufacture and maintenance of equipment and other infrastructure necessary to agricultural production and distribution as defined in the above referenced CISA Memorandum.

Further, Lyco is considered an essential business that is part of a critical infrastructure industry and our employees are essential workers. It is therefore the policy of the our state government that our company and industry continue to function with minimal disruption in the event of an emergency, It is imperative that we are open for public health, safety, and to serve our community as we all work together to end this pandemic.

I understand operation challenges during this extraordinary time and the protection, health and safety of our and your people is priority number one. We appreciate your commitment, leadership, and partnership during this critical time.

Should you have any questions concerning this letter, please contact one of the following people:

Brad Weber | Operatations Manager – 920-623-4152 ext. 107
Steve Hughes | CEO – 920-623-4152 ext. 115

Certified by,

William Zittel | President

Download the Essential Business Letter 3-23-2020

COVID-19 Remediation Statement

March 27, 2020

Dear Valued Customer:

Lyco Manufacturing, Inc. remains focused on keeping our associates, their families, our customers and our business partners safe as we navigate through this Covid-19 World Pandemic.

Our customers are critical suppliers to the World Food Chain, and we recognize our responsibility to support you. Therefore, our manufacturing operation remains open and we continue to serve our customers that need to operate during this global emergency.

The following are the steps we have implemented over recent weeks, in an effort to minimize our risks and continue to fulfill our commitments.

  • 80% of our office associates are working from their home offices.
  • Our production associates have been split into three (3) shifts with minimal overlap.
  • We are educating our associates and managing social distancing in all phases of our operation.
  • Lyco has installed sanitation stations in designated areas throughout the production facility.
  • Vendors are prohibited from entering the facility.
  • Delivery procedures have been established and are followed.
  • Our State governor has issued a “Safe at Home Order”. Lyco Manufacturing is certified as an essential business and is permitted to operate at this time.
  • We have contacted our vendors and notified them that we are Essential Critical Infrastructure.
  • We remain in contact with our vendors daily to ensure inventories are adequate and deliveries can be achieved.
  • Lyco has increased our material and parts inventory to ensure availability.
  • We continue to monitor this everchanging environment to ensure we not only meet, but exceed, OSHA, CDC, DHS and local and federal guidelines.
  • We are committed to using and exploring available technology such as Skype, TEAMS and Vuforia Chalk.
  • Lyco strongly encourages our customers to utilize our capability of “Remote Access” for trouble shooting and support.

Please feel free to contact me at steve.hughes(at)lycomfg.com or my cell 920-979-33o1 if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Steve Hughes | CEO

Download Lyco Covid-19 Lyco Remediation Steps

Hughes Consumable Parts

Dear Valued Customer:

This letter is to inform you that Lyco Manufacturing, Inc. recently acquired certain assets from Hughes Equipment Co., of Columbus, WI. Those items include some consumable service parts for their:

Blancher / Cooker and Snap Bean product lines

We’re working diligently to absorb drawings and consumable parts to be able to serve you shortly after the first of the year with parts that were on Hughes’ shelves in inventory. Lead times on other items will have to be determined.

We are happy to announce that Lisa Adam who was Inside Sales Manager at Hughes is now with our Parts Team at Lyco. Lisa brings many years of experience serving the Food Industry having worked at Hughes. Of course, we have Tammy Springer who has been a tremendous asset to Lyco for 16 years and who will continue to handle Lyco Parts.

Tony Lieggi, our Service Manager, is now scheduling our On-Site Inspections with experts who build our machines who can audit them and save you valuable time. Inspections include comprehensive reports and recommendations for corrections.

Please give us a call at (920) 623-4152 so we can help you ensure a trouble free and profitable New Year.

Sincerely,

William Zittel | President

Lyco Featured in Portage Daily Register Article

Lyco was recently featured in an article in the Portage Daily Register. Dawn’s Foods is expanding with the help of new Lyco equipment. We love being part of the continued growth and success of each of our clients.

Portage Daily Register Article with Lyco

Water Reuse System

Lyco’s Water Reuse System can save money, cut cleaning and maintenance time, and reduce consumption of water resources — up to 15 million gallons per year. This revolutionary system removes suspended solids and reuses water from any slaughter process — poultry or red meat — and returns this water back to the main process. The system’s small footprint makes it ideal for many water reuse applications. A 200 GPM saving can return more than $150,000 a year.

New Sanitary Zero Maintenance Screens feature covers that open for full access, Clean-In-Place system with spray balls and rapid-change dual canister filters with automated purging.
Systems are available for 50 gpm – 400 gpm.

Clean-Flow Blanchers®

Clean-Flow® Blanchers / Cookers came to market in 2007 and they are called that because depending upon the product they run, they are cleaned-up in minutes compared to the many hours for competitive designs. This allows faster change-over.

They are called “The best pasta, rice and vegetable cookers in the world!” because they contain patented water agitation that breaks up heavy dense loads of product and keeps them separated and suspended in motion so each particle of food is treated exactly the same way.

Spaghetti to filled pastas are uniformly and thoroughly cooked. Sticking and clumping are totally eliminated which increases yield by as much 10-15% compared batch cook-quench-chill systems or older rotary drum blancher designs. They are used in our continuous (not batch) Cook / Quench / Chill system which is far superior to batch systems.

Clean-Flow® Blanchers save labor, water, energy and reduce maintenance cost to nearly zero — after years of running.

We make 30″, 40″, 50″ and 60″ diameter models. CONTACT US to run your products in our Laboratory and we’ll show you what perfect quality looks like!

Continuous Pressure-Flow® Cooker


In 2017 we installed a CONTINUOUS PRESSURE-FLOW® COOKER operating system in our laboratory. It includes: A Feed Conveyor, Soak Tanks, Dewatering Belt, Pump Line, a Screen, a 30″ Pressure Cooker and a Vibrating Dewatering unit (not shown).

We have run hundreds of successful tests on dry beans, rice and more. Every food processor who has seen the line run has been very impressed. One called it a “GAME CHANGER that will be the way we process dry beans in the future.”

Dry Beans are pre-soaked for 2 to 4 hours and fed into the Pressure Cooker where they are fully cooked in 6 to 8 minutes. The result is IQF Quality product and retorting is not necessary. A major processing step eliminated for dry beans.

Rice is cooked to perfection in 5 to 8 minutes, is pure white, has the right texture, and holds more starch which increases recovery. Every customer who has seen the process has been impressed.

CONTACT US to run your products in our laboratory and see the dramatic results for yourself.