![]() ![]() “We have deep water berth with railroad and highway access,” FitzGibbon said. The refinery sits on the junction of Baltimore Harbor, where its raw materials come in, and Interstate 95 and the B&O Railroad, which take out its finished products. One of the other reasons for Domino’s continued success may be harder to replicate–its location. The raw sugar then travels by conveyor belt through a byzantine array of filtration devices and methods–affination, centrifuges, carbonation, charification, vacuum boilers, granulators–up and down the eight stories of the plant, before being stored in silos to await packaging. The sugar travels by a conveyor belt, swarming with feasting bees, to a massive hangar that can hold up to 100 million pounds of sugar in piles over 60-feet high. Unloading the raw sugar from the ship, at 10 million pounds per day, usually takes about a week. “Making sugar–it seems like it’s not rocket science,” said Ann-Margaret Deavers an environmental engineer at the Domino plant, “but actually it is.”Ī few times a month, a giant tanker ship docks at the Domino plant. Melding these geriatric machines with their newer technology into a cohesive production unit is no easy feat. The refinery has its own machine shop to make replacement parts for equipment that is long out of production. “They’ve been able to stay on the cutting edge of innovation and by doing so, that’s made them remain competitive in this business,” said Jennifer Vey, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who has analyzed Baltimore manufacturing. ![]() The plant in Baltimore is the only one in the country that produces sugar in retail-sized plastic tubs, as opposed to bags, negating the need for a sugar jar. The refinery in Baltimore produces not just granulated, powdered, and brown sugars, but also flavored sugars, pharmaceutical grade sugars, and other specialty products in a variety of packagings. FitzGibbon said that the move to an array of value-added products is crucial to remaining profitable. Sugar packets are just one of the 40 different final products–retail and bulk–that the factory produces. The conveyer belt moves so fast that you need a strobe light to see the packets fly by. High tech machinery spits out more than 350 billion single-serving sugar packets per year. And while they’ve also reduced the size of their workforce to about 600 from over 1,000 a generation ago, the company says they’ve done it through attrition rather than layoffs.ĭomino’s packaging warehouse looks nothing like the rest of the refinery. “We’ve reduced the cost of operation by reducing energy consumption,” FitzGibbon said. That natural gas fuels an on-site power plant with a 17-megawatt capacity that not only powers the entire refinery, but is also capable of selling power back to the grid. Two of Domino’s five boilers were installed when the plant switched from fuel oil to natural gas in the early 2000s. The plant, which recently invested $2 million in new clean air technology, presents a remarkable dichotomy between an aging industrial behemoth and cutting-edge technological innovation. Walls and stairways are dingy with industrial grime, heavy steel fire doors have been in place since the 1920s, and some original machinery is still in use, helping to process 6.5 million pounds of raw sugar a day.īut looks can be deceiving. And finally, Domino and the rest of the sugar industry have lobbied aggressively to maintain sugar price guarantees from the federal government that help American producers compete with foreign rivals.ĭomino has been operating in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for 90 years (the sign is 61 years old). Second, their location on the Inner Harbor is ideally suited to their business. “The ability of a blue-collar worker to earn a good living is only in manufacturing, you don’t go to the service sector for that,” FitzGibbon said.ĭomino still operates in Baltimore for a number of reasons: First, they’ve updated their facilities, their methods and their products. They’ve been replaced, to the extent that they have, with service sector giants like Legg Mason, Morgan Stanley and Hilton. Long gone are Domino contemporaries and former Inner Harbor icons like Western Electric, Allied Chemical, and Procter & Gamble. The Domino sugar refinery, with its iconic red neon sign, is still open, but the confusion is understandable.ĭomino is the last major manufacturer still operating in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. ![]() “I went into a shop to buy some bait,” FitzGibbon recalled, “and a guy sees my shirt and said to me, ‘Oh I love the sign, too bad they’re not still open.’” RELATED STORY: A Baltimore brewery is bringing back old time alcohol BALTIMORE – Stu FitzGibbon, the refinery manager of the Domino Sugar plant in Baltimore, was wearing a Domino sweatshirt on a recent fishing trip. ![]()
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