Ready meal specialist My Muscle Chef officially opened its new $55 million facility today, giving the company capacity to grow from producing 500,000 meals a week to 1.2 million. Food & Drink Business was there.
Founded by brothers Tushar and Nish Menon, the Yennora logistics and manufacturing plant in Sydney’s western suburbs is four times the size of its previous site across the road.
“When we moved into that building five years ago, we were doing 75,000 meals a week. I walked in and thought, surely, we’re never going to fill this, and we were nervous about whether we had over-committed ourselves. We outgrew it in two years,” Tushar said at the launch.
“We’ve invested over $55 million into the site with world class leading technology and infrastructure to improve and enhance the quality of our products.
“At the same time, we haven’t lost the core essence of the product, which is a homemade chef prepared meal. We’ve done our best in terms of automation processes but not too much,” he said.
Tushar’s comments were echoed by head of operations Tobias Dunn, who took Food & Drink Business on a tour through the factory.
“The build had to give us scale while staying true to the brand and our customers; that means everything is cooked and baked like it would be at a restaurant. We have a team of chefs, and the kitchen is run as it would in a restaurant.
“There is a full roster of 120 chefs preparing the food, which is very labour intensive. The fitout was designed to make it as streamlined and efficient as possible, without taking away the human element,” Dunn said.
The build and fitout took 24 months and employed around 200 people. The company currently employs 500 and that will grow 20 per cent to more than 600 once operations are at capacity.
It has also seen operations condense from three separate locations. The site is sectioned into four distinct zones – warehousing, kitchen, packing, and logistics.
My Muscle Chef makes 65 different SKUs each week in two production runs.
There are three lines, with room for a fourth. Two of the lines are automated and one is manual. The type of meal determines which line it runs on.
Tushar said, “At capacity we will use 160 tonnes of protein and more than 250 tonnes of fresh veg every single week. But what excites us is that as we grow, we also support the 200 local growers that we source our products from.
“We’re very proud of the fact that most of our products are sourced from Australian farmers and growers.”
My Muscle Chef’s range now extends from ready meals to bars, cookies, drinks, and oats.
As well as being stocked in supermarkets nationwide it has an online ordering service for customers.
