LYNN HAVEN — If you ate Quaker Oats or Raisin Bran this morning, it’s likely your breakfast made contact with a MERRICK Industries machine before it reached the bowl.
It was a reference MERRICK president Joe Tannehill communicated to about 40
“We make the machines that put the raisins and the bran together,” Tannehill said. “We weigh bulk materials and we typically do it while it’s moving. We deal with dry bulk materials that need to be fed at a specific weight.”
Instead of producing one machine a million times,
“A lot of our employees like that,” he said. “It’s constantly new and challenging.”
The tour was just one of several coordinated by the Northwest Florida Manufacturers Council in October to honor National Manufacturing Month and help foster careers in advanced manufacturing.
More than 20 schools and 16 manufacturing facilities in the region participated this year, including Gulf Power Co. Plant Crist, Ascend Performance Materials, International Paper, Taminco, General Electric, Marianna Airmotive, Manown Engineering, Armstrong World Industries, ARCO, Trane, General Dynamics, Rex-Lumber, West Point Homes, Green Circle Bioenergy and Fort Walton Machining.
“It’s hard to find manufacturing talent,” Tannehill said. “We’re trying to reach as young as we can.”
The Northwest Florida Manufacturers Council was created about a year-and-a-half ago and has since pushed for the development of manufacturing academies at six Panhandle school districts.
He said it’s often difficult to fill open positions at
Ann Leonard, career and technical education director for Bay District Schools, said the goal of the tour was to expose the students in
“There’s an initiative right now to try to develop a pipeline of talent for the manufacturing industry,” said Leonard, referencing a push to change the negative perception manufacturing jobs often carry. “They’re good-paying jobs and there’s a wide variety.”