As companies grow, the equipment they use plays an increasingly important role in their success. At Rice Lake Weighing Systems, we are proud to manufacture the industry’s highest quality and most innovative scales, instrumentation, dimensioning systems and more—providing solutions to advance your enterprise. Welcome to the spring edition of Rice Lake Magazine, featuring applications in which our equipment plays a vital role in process improvement and expansion.

In Brilliance at Brion’s, a family-owned grocery store renovates their business from the ground up to fulfill the community’s need for a deli-style restaurant. Rice Lake Retail’s Ishida Uni-3 price computing scale replaces a manual system to better keep up with demand.

Continue with Rice Lake Red Goes Green to learn how the Akron Zoo’s composting efforts and zero-waste mindset leads them to install a custom, heavy-duty RoughDeck® floor scale. The system weighs the zoo’s utility vehicle, filled with compostable material, as it unloads into a grinder. This initiative supports the zoo’s conservation and citywide beautification endeavors. 

In Noble Mountain, natural beauty comes to life as you delve into the Oregon Christmas tree industry. One of the world’s largest producers of Christmas trees, Noble Mountain Tree Farm uses robust technology, including helicopters and Rice Lake’s RoughDeck® AX-1 axle scale, to streamline their harvest and avoid overloaded trucks.

Dual 1280 Enterprise™ Series weight indicators demonstrate their impressive technological strength to automate a masonry plant’s entire process in 1280 in Full Control. From raw materials, through the oven and mixers to the bagging line, Rice Lake instrumentation is the driving force behind accuracy and efficiency at this manufacturing plant, helping them achieve new levels of production.

A pork processing facility utilizes RoughDeck® QC-X sanitary floor scales in each step of their process in Extreme Clean. The environment requires regular washdowns to ensure safe, high quality products are delivered to consumers. 480 Legend® Series digital weight indicators track production and QC-X floor scales thrive in this ultra-hygienic application.

Fair Weight tells the story of a 4-H group’s fundraising for an improved livestock weighing event at the Polk County Fair. By building a dedicated scale barn and implementing Rice Lake’s SAS single animal livestock scale, a day-long practice improves to become a safer, more time-efficient experience. The SAS single animal livestock scale also prepares the fair for the future, as legislation on the horizon will soon require all Wisconsin fairs to use a Legal for Trade scale for weighing livestock.

Dimensioning technology propels a light bulb company’s shipping department to the next level in Bright Idea in Shipping. By installing iDimension® 3D dimensioning systems and Logistyx SHIP-IT™ software, a once-tedious method of selecting the best shipping rate becomes a lightning-fast procedure capable of handling twice the throughput.

Closing out this edition, Gold Standard Calibration explores the mining industry, where gold bullion requires the most exact calibrations possible. To accommodate the unique needs of this application, Rice Lake developed custom troy ounce, stainless steel weights to ensure precision balances produce exact weight readings every time.

From a small-town deli to a zoo, Christmas trees, masonry products, pork, livestock, light bulbs and gold, this issue of Rice Lake Magazine has something for everyone! I hope you find motivation through the fascinating applications in the pages that follow. Please remember at Rice Lake, we have solutions to help advance your enterprise, no matter the weighing need or industry. Should you have an interesting story with Rice Lake products, feel free to reach out to us by emailing [email protected].

Steve Hersman
Vice President of Global Sales, Rice Lake Weighing Systems