The Drake Blog

In between helping customers, we sat down with Chris Widener, the Drake Sales Engineer, to talk about the latest happenings at Drake. Chris works closely with Drake’s sales representatives and the engineering group to ensure our loaders meet or exceed customer expectations.

Drake: “Thanks for making time to chat with us today, Chris. So, what exciting things have you been up to recently?”

Chris: “Probably the coolest thing I’ve seen in the last few months. In fact, maybe one of the top ten in my twenty-one years at Drake...we built a split-chain frank loader.”

Drake: “Tell us how that’s different from a standard loader.”

Chris: “Last year a customer came to us and told us they wanted to run both two- and three-lane applications on their new Drake loader. In the past, we’ve built Drake loaders that can load three lanes of franks into a packager, or one lane can be shut off and it can load two lanes into the packager. But, we’d never made a loader where three narrow lanes convert into two wide lanes, although this was precisely what the customer needed for their unique situation. Even though we had never done anything like this before, because it would help our customer, we made it happen. 

What many people do not realize is that it’s easy to make something complex, but it can take a long time to create a simpler design. Our lead engineer worked long and hard to create a chain that was relatively straightforward to convert from two lanes to three. We were definitely breaking new ground with this loader, but because our customer needed it, we got it done.”

Drake: “Good to hear, Chris. I know we pride ourselves on our great customer service.”

Chris: “Oh, absolutely. What else is really impressive about this project is how we took a mature design and found ways to improve it. Hot dog loading equipment has been around a long time. And it’s great when a customer asks us to do something that we wouldn’t have considered even ten years ago when I was a Drake design engineer, and we push the envelope of what we believe is possible, and the customer gets exactly what they need.”

Drake: “Even if it hasn’t been done before?”

Chris: “Especially if it hasn’t been done before. Our mission is to build the best possible loader for our customers’ unique loading needs.”

Drake – Your Partner in Automating the Food Industry.