Modern Day David Battles Food Goliaths Every Day

David Lewis, Little Crow Foods’ plant operations guru, relishes his small company’s battles with the Goliaths of the food industry. And he is proud that the owners of his company have confidence that he will find ways to produce Little Crow’s products more efficiently than the competition. One of the stones in his slingshot is the pre-owned equipment he buys from Frain Industries.

“I come up with some very unusual ideas and I have always relied on Frain to work with me to make my schemes a reality,” said Lewis who has an aviation engineering background. “I go to Frain’s office and bounce ideas off them while I look at the machines in their million square foot warehouse. Mitch Budic, who heads up their engineering services division, is really helpful and often gives me the benefit of his experience.”

Little Crow Foods, a 102 year old, family-owned company headquartered in Warsaw Indiana, was one of Frain’s original customers 25 years ago. The company blends and packages multiple sku’s of cereal, corn starch, coffee, tea, pancake and coating mixes, and other similar products, which puts them nose to nose with the industry’s giants every day.

Small companies, like Little Crow Foods, and big ones listed among the Fortune 500 often take advantage of the knowledge that Frain has acquired in over 25 years of selling and renting pre-owned equipment. “We are a tremendous resource for our customers,” said Rich Frain, President. “We’ve seen and heard just about everything. And everything we do helps companies be more competitive in terms of keeping their costs low and managing deadlines like time- to-market.”

But Frain goes beyond the delivery of those two primary customer benefits. “I do a lot of homework before I buy anything,” explains Little Crow’s David. “On my last project I purchased an ADCO cartoner from Frain that could do the job. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it was the best machine available. On its own, Frain found another cartoner that was perfect for what I wanted, called me with an offer to swap and held my price as well. It was a mutually beneficial deal but, still, that’s unusual service by any other company.”

Frain Industries, Inc. the world leader in pre-owned processing and packaging equipment, is headquartered in Franklin Park, IL where it has a million square feet of warehouse space and a 6,500 machine inventory. The company’s engineering services division occupies 45,000 square feet of the warehouse and includes a complete machine shop and a $5 million spare part inventory. Frain sells and rents pre-owned equipment to companies in industries such as food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and chemicals.