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The Client

Inghams Enterprises is a family-owned company, the largest poultry business in Australia. They produce chilled and frozen poultry products for supermarkets and quick service restaurants in Australia and New Zealand.

The Challenge

To maximise the shelf life of their chilled poultry products, Inghams seeks to minimise the length of time required to chill their products. To achieve this they use very low temperatures to deep chill the product. In doing so, they require tight controls over the time spent in these low temperatures to ensure the product does not freeze, as otherwise it cannot be marketed as fresh.

Inghams engaged Milmeq to provide chilling facilities in several of their processing sites, including the Murarrie site when it was built in 2001.

A variety of products are produced at Murarrie, including whole birds and further processed and packed portions. Inghams required equipment that could provide a consistent level of chilling for all product types.

Increases in throughput, product size and further processing meant more chilling capacity was required, and in 2010 Inghams contracted Milmeq once again to provide a solution.

Our Solution

A MILMEQ® Multiple Retention Time (MRT) Tunnel with 4,400 carton capacity was initially installed at Murarrie. This provided the ability to automatically index different product types, sort and chill them for appropriate times according to the product weight and density. The products are subjected to -25°C for times between 30 minutes and two hours for chilling, or up to 24 hours for freezing.

When additional capacity was required, it was identified that product requiring the two hour chilling time made up the majority of production, and so a MILMEQ® Single Retention Time (SRT) Tunnel with 3,600 carton capacity was designed specifically to accommodate this product. In the SRT tunnel the product is automatically loaded, indexed on time, deep chilled in -25°C environment and unloaded after two hours chilling time.

The Result

The MRT tunnel and SRT tunnel provide an efficient, effective and trouble free solution for chilling and freezing at Inghams Murarrie.

The deep chilling process results in Inghams products having market leading shelf life, which allows them to be sold at a premium. The automated materials handling functionality of the SRT and MRT also helps them to minimise the health and safety risks that arise from manual handling.

Folllowing the success of the SRT tunnel installation at Murarrie, Inghams engaged Milmeq to provide an SRT tunnel at their Bolivar site. Our MRT tunnels have also been installed at two other Inghams sites.