GEA Food Solutions has delivered, installed and commissioned two 1000mm wide processing lines for the new Cargill integrated poultry operation in Lai’an, in the Anhui province of China.
The first line processes chicken nuggets at a rate of 30 tons per day while the second line processes boneless and bone-in poultry products.
The lines represent a €10m order for GEA Food Solutions, which worked closely with GEA Refrigeration Technology for the deepfreeze and cooling part of the project. To successfully implement the two lines in a short space of time also meant working closely with partners like logistics and rigging specialists Convoy (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) and integrated packaging solutions provider Hellings Machinebouw (Sint Oedenrode, the Netherlands), which handled the transport belt automation around GEA SmartPacker vertical packaging machines.
Project manager for GEA Food Solutions Mikhail Volynkin said: “China is an important region for both GEA and Cargill, and the success of this project has strengthened the long-standing relationship between our two companies.”
Cargill officially inaugurated its world-class vertically integrated poultry operation in China in September 2013. The project covers each stage of the poultry supply chain, including chicken breeding, raising, feed production, hatching, slaughtering and processing. The facility has the capacity to process approximately 65 million chickens per year, as well as 176,000 metric tons poultry products per year and is part of Cargill’s support for the modernization of agriculture and food safety in China.
Discussions with GEA for the processing lines started in late 2012, and on-site installation commenced in January 2014. Nine months later, the first kilogram of nuggets was produced, and the line is now capable of running at an even higher capacity than originally specified. The project covers the full scope of GEA Food Solutions’ equipment, including preparation, marination, processing, freezing and packaging machines. Line one features partial frying (‘par fry’) for nugget production, while line two has a GEA spiral oven for various fully cooked poultry parts.
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