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The Client

SuKarne is Mexico’s largest beef processor, with seven processing sites across the country including Culiacan, which is also the location of their head office. Growing demand for their products from local and export markets has meant the company has undergone rapid expansion during the last five years.

The Challenge

Historically, SuKarne had sent warm product off-site to an external supplier for chilling and distribution. Transport of the product in the Mexican heat presented challenges for meeting the strict food safety standards demanded by export markets and compromised the product shelf life.

With the objectives of increasing plant throughput and producing superior quality product for export markets, they have recently sought to add chilling and/or freezing capabilities into their plants to allow them to provide complete processing and logistics for export in-house.

SuKarne engaged us to provide an efficient solution for chilling cartons of meat product at a number of plants including Culiacan.

Our Solution

We spent time working with SuKarne to identify and meet their specific needs. As well as the required throughput, special design consideration was given to the cartons being used to hold the meat, as these had a particularly thick grade of cardboard which provides an insulating effect.

We supplied and installed a MILMEQ® Single Retention Time (SRT) Tunnel for the Culiacan processing site.

The tunnel is designed to chill 4,680 cartons filled with 110 tonnes of meat from 14°C to 0°C in a 12 hour cycle.

The tunnel chills cartons individually rather than in pallet lots. This speeds up the chilling process and provides consistency of chilling, ensuring all product reaches the same chill level. It also provides quality improvements over the blast freezing processes previously used.

A further three chilling and three freezing tunnels have also installed in other SuKarne processing sites. We developed a standardised design for use across all of these sites, providing a consistent experience for operators ensuring a cost-effective solution.

The Result

The tunnel at Culiacan continues to operate well, with no mechanical issues. Product quality and shelf life has been enhanced due to the quick chilling times achieved.

The client has been so impressed with the efficiency of our project delivery that they have held us up as an example to their other contractors. We are continuing to work with them on further plans for expansion at this and other sites.