The growing consumer appetite for pre-prepared meals has resulted in a new purpose-built facility for Adelaide-based Australian Wholefoods.
The company manufactures cooked and baked products under its own Clever Cooks, Home Chef and Signature Dish ranges as well as for the supermarkets.
The company was using rack ovens and many manual processes at its old facility, which was restricting the company’s process flow and did not meet the world manufacturing standard, British Retail Compliance (BRC), required by its retail customers.
So when it outgrew its old facility, it moved production to its old copper pot dip site. Here, it installed an Auto-Bake oven, cooler and chiller for its Clever Cooks range of products, which includes quiche, lasagne and shepherds pie.
Michael Demetriou, co-director of Australian Wholefoods, says the Auto-Bake installation offered the company a higher level of automation, flexibility and capacity, and also allowed it to design a facility that was better able to meet the increasingly stringent hygiene requirements of ready meal production.
“The Auto-Bake system did satisfy the criteria of our supermarkets, who are very demanding in terms of ensuring we don’t have any cross contamination, and they’re impressed with our set-up,” Demetriou says.
Ready meals are classified as high risk food, so the standards require segregation from low care to high care, he says. In order to do this you have to separate preparation areas in a way that doesn’t allow people to walk from one room into another.
Auto-Bake’s technical sales manager, Graeme Bonner, says the company customised a solution to suit these requirements as well as the layout of the new premises.
“We came up with a concept that kept the machinery on different levels,” Bonner says.
Auto-Bake supplied the ovens and worked closely with third parties to integrate them with the coolers and chillers. All of the equipment needed to be installed in a very short time frame. The company set aside just six months for the move to ensure minimal disruption to production.
Australian Wholefoods now operates two Auto-Bake ovens, one for its lasagne and shepherds pie, and the other for its quiche.
The company can do small runs quite comfortably, according to Demetriou, but when it has a big run, it can use both ovens for the same product, providing flexibility.
“Due the fact that this is a very short shelf life product, there is a fair bit of demand on our processing techniques,” he says. “When there’s a need to do promotional activity, we can turn it on very quickly and triple, and even quadruple, the output if we need it to.
“The ovens enable us to have product loaded, it gets cooked and then chilled to four degrees, which meets Australian standards, all within three hours.
“We need to be very competitive with processing and pricing and to do this we need to run things very lean and equipment needs to work as efficiency as possible.”
Demetriou says that because the company decided to adopt a more automated, ‘conveyorised’ system, now no one needs to be on hand to operate it, and it can even be monitored remotely.
He says the Auto-Bake system has provided the company with plenty of room to grow.
“Our current capacity is about 30 per cent. When you build a facility of this size, you don’t build it to have only 20 or 10 per cent left of growth, so we’ve allowed plenty of capacity there.”
The new Auto-Bake oven, cooler and chiller system is fully automated and offers Australian Wholefoods plenty of room to grow.
