Fremont Automation started 30 years ago by my dad, Dave Bennish. So, in the backyard of our house growing up, we had a machine shop. And over the years, Dave was always seeing different areas of opportunity and the challenges our customers would have. So he started thinking, well, why can’t I make a machine to help with that?
The reputation really became: if the equipment doesn’t exist, you come to us because we do everything in-house. We will do the concepting. We will do the design. We will do all the fabrication. We do the electrical schematic, specking of the components, PLC programming, and then we go into the install. And from there, we’re going to continue to work on that equipment until it is perfect. So, we can hand over that piece of equipment to our customer and say, “It’s yours.”
Our customers face a very unique issue in food processing, which you have live animals coming in, and they don’t stop. And those things have to be processed. When you bring in equipment that isn’t always reliable, or you’re not getting the aftermarket support that is expected, you have people whose jobs are on the line. They need to get product out the door.
And so we’ve developed that relationship, that trust with our customers now to where when we say we can do this and we can make it happen. They know we can. And they know we’ll be there day in and day out making sure that that equipment runs for them and they’re trained and they have all the support they need. We continue bringing that automation and that innovation for their business and for their employees and to make the jobs easier and keep product coming out the door to get into the grocery stores.
It’s the after-support that is where the struggle is. And when we can show up day in and day out and they know they can trust us and rely on us and we’ll get it handled. What our customers are realizing is our size is our strength. There are 14 of us here at Fremont Automation, and we’re doing it all in-house, but because of our size, we’re able to react very quickly to our customers’ needs, and they know that they matter to us.
One of our core values is really the homegrown innovation aspect. We are really proud of the fact that we get to build
equipment here in Nebraska and by bringing in people with backgrounds from machining to electrical, giving them opportunities to come together and develop things that don’t exist, and doing it with integrity and solving problems is really the background of what we do. We want to do what hasn’t been done.
