The challenge
Our customer is a leading food producer operating across central and southern Africa, holding a varied portfolio of prominent and much-loved brands.
Defrosting in its facility was carried out in a traditional way, by using air defrosting chambers. The whole process used to take 24-48 hours. Due to the long and variable process times and being a batch system, the production flow and flexibility were negatively affected, making it impossible or at least troublesome and costly changing production schedules at short notice to satisfy customers’ urgent requirements.
The solution
Eventually, with the purchase and installation of a Stalam defrosting equipment, our customer could enjoy several benefits. First, the defrosting time has been reduced from 1-2 days to a bunch of minutes, with immediate advantages in production capacity and scheduling. Then, the continuous machine operation has eased the logistics and product flow from the cold storage to the following processing steps, making it possible to handle also last-minute orders without any difficulty. Last but not least, drip losses have also diminished drastically, thus improving both profitability and quality of the final products.
Thanks to all these improvements, our valuable customer has achieved a 3-months payback on the investment, that confirms the outstanding overall profitability of COLDWAVE+.
By the way… the customer has lately granted us the order for a second RF defroster, to be installed in another of its production facilities.