Meat processing is a high-throughput business; it is labor-intensive with a lot of heavy repetitive lifting in a harsh chill store environment.
Cimcorp's gantry robot solutions are found in the suppliers’ meat cutting and packaging facilities as well as in retailers’ distribution centers where meat is picked, sorted and distributed to stores. Similar concepts and solutions to those used with fresh meat apply also to convenience foods and processed meat products.
Some of the common characteristics for all meat processing and distribution:
- Labor-intensive manual handling
- Hostile environment; typically -1°C - +2°C in chill stores
- Very repetitive work with heavy lifting – resulting in high staff turnover and difficulties to recruit in many areas
- Multi-shift operation
- Number of SKUs are increasing as are supermarkets’ service level demands
- 3-shift processing operations to be combined with very tight delivery schedules to the retail side of the business.
All these factors, plus the use of standard crates, make meat and convenience food distribution an ideal gantry robot operation. Plastic crates for raw meat typically re-circulate within the processing plant whereas crates for packaged product are used through the supply chain – often all the way to the retailer’s shelf.