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15/10/2026

Before filtration, industrial fryers were judged by eye.

A person stood at the end of the line with a card showing three shades of chicken breast, and when the product drifted to the wrong shade, they dumped the oil and started the run again.

It meant the first piece a plant made never matched the last one.

Brian Pfau of Oberlin Filter Company picked that as the project he is proudest of. Oberlin has made exactly one product since 1964.

👉 Catch the full conversation here: https://bit.ly/4i8kO6I

15/10/2026

Lego is putting more than $400 million into its plant in Monterrey, Mexico.

The expansion adds over 667,000 square feet, including a new packing hall and a fully automated high bay warehouse with storage stacks running from 40 feet to more than 150 feet. It creates 1,300 jobs on top of the 7,300 already there and lifts the site's total production capacity by 35 percent. Monterrey opened in 2008 and is the largest plant Lego owns anywhere. Construction runs from early 2027 into 2029.

Now the US side. Lego is also finishing a $1 billion factory in Chesterfield County, Virginia, and that one has been slow. Production was supposed to start in late 2025, but Lego pushed it to 2027 while it finalized its general contractor and worked through design plans.

The building is finished, the workforce is doubling to 900, and it opens in January. Monterrey is where the bricks get boxed. Virginia is where they get made.

👉 Check out the full episode and blog article at: https://www.industrialsage.com/headlines-episode-34/

14/10/2026

"You have a culture whether you define it or not." — Jim Mayer

Most manufacturers don't think about culture until something goes wrong. But according to Jim Mayer, Founder of The MFG Connector, culture isn't built by reading books or hiring consultants. It already exists. The only question is whether it's the culture you actually want.

At its core, culture is the alignment of values between an organization and its employees. When that alignment exists, people show up with pride and purpose. When it doesn't, you hire anyone available and wonder why turnover never stops.

Intentionality is the only variable.

👉 Check out the full episode and blog article at: https://bit.ly/4hntMNf

13/10/2026

Process engineers called Roman Lafage asking for their own AI and data environment.

Not a corporate rollout. Plant-level engineers who wanted to build something.

Three years ago that request would not have existed. Roman, VP of Digital Operations at ofi, on how fast plant capabilities are evolving and what the plant team of the future looks like.

👉 Check out the episode and blog article at: https://bit.ly/4rsskwn

Schneider Electric AVEVA

13/10/2026

A farm cooperative founded in 1921 is building the largest honey bottling plant on earth, and it is going up in Iowa.

Sioux Honey Association broke ground on September 22nd in Sioux City on a $130 million plant covering 440,000 square feet. It will house a raw material warehouse, processing equipment and 5 bottling lines, raising capacity by 50 percent, and it pulls the company's Anaheim, California operation into Iowa. Processing is expected to be running by the summer of 2028.

The plant adds roughly 39 positions, which is modest for a $130 million project, and that is worth saying plainly.

Here is what makes this one different. Sioux Honey has no outside shareholders. It is the only honey cooperative in the country, owned by more than 180 beekeeping families who supply it, so the people who voted to spend $130 million are the same people who will ship into that plant for decades.

👉 Check out the full episode and blog article at: https://www.industrialsage.com/headlines-episode-34/

09/10/2026

200 robots, installed over four years, in a single plant in Taichung, Taiwan.

Acme Manufacturing built the system for the largest zinc die caster of plumbing parts in the world. President and CEO Fritz Carlson went back to visit the customer this year, a decade after it was commissioned.

Most buyers evaluating automation never find out how a line holds up in year ten. Fritz did.

👉 Full conversation on IndustrialSage: https://www.industrialsage.com/acme-manufacturing-robotic-finishing-imts-2026/

09/10/2026

The $14 billion modernization plan U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel announced for American operations now has concrete in the ground in Alabama.

On September 21st U.S. Steel broke ground on a $475 million quench and tempering line at its Fairfield Tubular Operations outside Birmingham. The project is expected to create roughly 250 permanent jobs and about 600 construction jobs, with work running through 2029.

Quench and tempering is a heat treatment: you heat the steel, cool it fast, then heat it again. That is what makes a pipe tough enough to go down a deep, high pressure oil well without cracking. Today a lot of that heavy duty pipe gets imported.

Supporters of the Nippon deal promised it would bring real capital spending back home. Fairfield is the first place that promise meets concrete.

👉 Check out the full episode and blog article at: https://www.industrialsage.com/headlines-episode-34/

08/10/2026

"As leaders, we walk around shop floors and we see what we think is going to be the bottleneck. But that's rarely what the bottleneck is for the people who are running the job." — Jim Mayer

Jim runs an exercise called Shop Floor Shark Tank. Cross-departmental teams identify their biggest pain point, build a solution together, and present it to ownership in front of the whole company. The caveat: ownership commits to implementing the winning idea within 30 days.

One shop's winner was a larger parts washing station. Bought and installed within weeks. Bottleneck gone.

When employees have a hand in solving the problems they live with every day, they start thinking like owners.

👉 Check out the full episode and blog article at: https://bit.ly/4hntMNf

07/10/2026

✈️ "I think there's this irrational fear that you're gonna say the wrong thing and that's gonna go viral to hundreds of thousands of people."

Chris Luecke has seen it stop people before they ever start: executives with real experience and genuine insights who never post because they are afraid of the blast radius of one bad take.

His reality check: when you start, you are building from practically zero. Your first post might get liked by the people who already know you. Your second post may get almost no engagement at all.

The risk is not that you will say something wrong and go viral. The bigger risk is that you will say something great and nobody will see it because you gave up after two posts.

The window in manufacturing content is still open. Start now, before the noise makes it harder.

👉 Check out the full episode and blog article at: https://bit.ly/4ynRONC

07/10/2026

Amazon is scaling up as a manufacturer of the machines that run its own warehouses.

On September 24th the company said it will invest more than $100 million in a 585,000 square foot plant in Greenwood, Indiana, creating 300 skilled manufacturing and engineering jobs at an average salary of nearly $100,000. The site will handle advanced fabrication, robotic welding, automated powder coating and final assembly, and it is expected to be operating by 2028.

The history matters here. Amazon has owned a robotics company since 2012, when it bought Kiva Systems for $775 million, but that work stayed in Massachusetts for years. Amazon did not open a dedicated robotics factory until 2021, in Westborough, at 350,000 square feet.

Then came a multibillion dollar site in Austin in August, and now Greenwood, which is two thirds bigger than Westborough. Amazon went from 1 dedicated robotics plant to 4, and 2 of those were announced 5 weeks apart.

👉 Check out the full episode and blog article at: https://www.industrialsage.com/headlines-episode-34/

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