We present a statistical analysis of failure data of an automated pizza production line covering a period of four years. The analysis includes the computation of the most important descriptive statistics of the failure data, the identification of the most important failures, the computation of the parameters of the theoretical distributions that best fit the failure data, and the investigation of the existence of autocorrelations and cross correlations in the failure data. The analysis is meant to guide food product machinery manufacturers and bread and bakery products manufacturers to improve the design and operation of the production lines that they manufacture and operate, respectively. It can also be useful to reliability analysts and manufacturing systems analysts who wish to model and analyze real manufacturing systems. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.