With an abundance of fertile farm land and innovative revolutionaries, Minnesota has been a force to be reckoned with for centuries in the agricultural and manufacturing industries. In the early years, farming was all done by hand, with a little help from heavy and difficult-to-operate machinery. Over the years, new inventions have made farming significantly easier, including the use of hydropower in watermills to increase grain production in Minneapolis (aka the “Mill City”).
With these new innovations, farmers were able to produce and distribute crops at a more rapid pace, creating a need for more automated processes. To fill this need, many of Minnesota’s largest companies began to revolutionize the food industry even further by making production simpler and more automated.
Industrial and manufacturing facilities began cropping up to help provide food globally. Most of these facilities were primarily in the southern part of the Twin Cities due to the close proximity to existing grain production facilities and river access. As the industry has exponentially grown, Egan Company has steadfastly provided its multi-trade services to grow customer business and enhance production in numerous facilities across the Midwest.
Today, food production follows a standard process – 
production on a farm/ranch, processing in a manufacturing facility, distribution to stores/restaurants, and consumption at a home/restaurant. But there’s a lot that goes into the processing step that many people don’t realize. Equipment needs to frequently be moved or upgraded, production lines require routine maintenance, facilities are expanded – and that’s when Egan Company is called.
Recently, Egan Company trades provided TreeHouse Foods upgrades to a private label food processing facility.
In May 2016, a building addition was added onto the existing facility. Egan provided underground plumbing and HVAC for the new space, with piping and sheet metal prefabricated in Egan’s Mechanical Shops. Once construction was complete, two, fully-functioning production lines were assembled for making and distributing snack foods across North America.
The teams worked alongside each other to install each piece of equipment for the production lines. Millwrights rigged, assembled, and precisely aligned the equipment, while process controls electricians followed up with the electrical installation for each piece of equipment.
“Working with other Egan trades is great. From my experience, customers enjoy having multiple trades with Egan on the same jobsite. They see a safe and clean environment with excellent communication.”
-Cole Witteman, Egan Millwright Field Leader
In addition, the control panels for the kitchen and conveyance systems were prefabricated in Egan’s U.L. 508A Panel Shop, then installed onsite to integrate with the existing system. Along these production lines, robot arms were installed by millwrights to pack and move the snack food along through production. These robots are programmed to be compatible with the control panel at each station of the line.
For industries like food production, Egan’s willingness to help other trades succeed and our in-house, multi-trade collaboration is an advantage unmatched by competitors.
Project Team: TreeHouse Foods
Egan Services Provided: Chilled water piping, plumbing, sheet metal exhaust duct, electrical installation, PLC/HMI programming, CAD, robot assembly and installation, cat walks, precise alignment & equipment moving, conveyance, electrical controls, and routine plant maintenance.
uction industry has stayed relatively manual. Machines simply can’t replicate the level of precision and technique required to install building systems; however, Egan Company’s U.L. 508A Panel Shop has found one way to use automation to its advantage.
construction, Egan Company has been involved with various expansions and developments of this luxury shopping mall.
As a customer for nearly 10 years, Mound-Westonka Schools rely on Egan Company for a number of maintenance needs, including boiler tune-ups and electrical outages. In summer 2016, Mound-Westonka High School had suddenly lost power, and a member of the school’s facility management team noticed smoke in the building. As Egan regularly works on various schools in the District, Egan’s Service team was called to the site.
arrival of the utility company to disconnect the school from the utility grid so they could safely evaluate the problem.
supply, fiber optic cabling, and all the wiring in the tunnel had to be repaired. With a new transformer, more than 6,400 feet of cable was installed to reconnect the service entrance conductors to the main electrical switchgear. New fiber optic cabling was installed to regain access to the District server.
With ever-evolving technology, it is essential for companies to provide employees the tools to improve and enhance skills. Egan Company has built a Technology Center to provide employees a way to grow skills and learn more about popular, and some new, systems used on Egan projects.
Empowering employees is the key to ensuring safety on all jobsites, and it’s something Egan Company takes to heart with its Safety Brings You Home program. The intention is to make any employee – from apprentice to field leader to project manager – feel comfortable speaking up when they see something risky or unsafe onsite or even in the office.
Highlights of these efforts include: 
Construction projects involve great collaboration. Engineers, designers, general contractors, specialty contractors, suppliers – all must work together. But it’s not often that these relationships evolve from vendor to customer.
The new expansion to their Owatonna facility adds over 360,000 square feet to the existing 1.2 million square feet facility. Egan’s Southern Minnesota team is providing electrical services to this new space, including general lighting and power.
Public transit in the Twin Cities has been evolving over the past decade with the addition of light rail to the sprawling Metro Transit bus system. This summer, a new kind of bus service started along the busy Snelling Avenue corridor, combining the best of both methods of transportation.
The summer of 2016 saw one Egan Company crew, consisting of all mechanical trades, working closely with M.A. Mortenson to perform complete renovations within two University of Minnesota buildings.
Updating Aging Infrastucture
Meanwhile, at Mariucci, the locker rooms were getting a much needed amenity upgrade. As you can imagine, a locker room has the potential to be a smelly and damp place. To alleviate some of this, the dehumidification units exhaust more air than usual into the room. It also offers a unique feature for the Gophers’ players: each locker has an exhaust fan that helps dry out equipment kept in the lockers.
The new system includes thermal people counters in doorways to keep track of the number of people who enter the bathroom. After a certain number of people have entered the bathroom, the display outside the bathroom switches into “clean mode” and it alerts MAC Facilities to assign an employee to clean it.