Marco helps Dutch company Henri BV serve up ''perfect fresh meal''
02 April 2012
Henri BV is the latest fresh food manufacturer to reap the rewards from the installation of the Marco Yield Control System (YCM)
Based in Drunen in the southern part of Holland, Henri BV is an established producer of chilled soups, sauces and meal components, with themes of Dutch, Classical, Italian, Oriental and 1001 flavours. As demand for its products grow, the company is expanding its portfolio and the Marco YCM install is an integral part of their new ready meal Hi-Care production facility.
The Henri ready meal assembly system is centred on Marco’s LineMaster workstations, a central DataMaster PC terminal and end of line checkweigher. Working in take-away mode, the LineMasters de-skill the manual meal assembly process. Operators, guided by their simple-to-use traffic light system, remove the required amount of any meal component from containers placed on the weighing platform behind the conveyor and place it in the meal tray.
The clever part of the Marco system is the automatic optimisation (AO) software operating quietly in the background. This continually monitors weighments at individual stations and adjusts target weights to keep the average weight addition and finished meal weight right on target. The operators are oblivious to these subtle changes and continue to weigh out ingredients consistently to the ‘green light’.
Henri’s Operations manager Peter Bergmans is delighted with the Marco system: “Quality is central to Henri and our starting point is always ensuring we use the freshest and best ingredients. We meet exacting exacting HACCP standards and we are BRC (British Retail Consortium) certified. This is an important step in our future growth and to remain competitive and profitable in such markets, we recognise that we must have real time control of our assembly process as part of an operation that can react swiftly to fluctuating customer requirements.”
Yield Control Management is an essential part of the overall ready meal assembly process: unwanted giveaway in terms of too much of a particular ingredient being added to a meal can impact on how the product looks and tastes as well as affecting profitability. Adding too little of one or more ingredients also affects product quality.
As Bergmans concludes: “With the Marco YCM system we are confident we have the best available processing equipment. The future proof design of the Marco profitability modules ensures we can expand our factory floor system as required.”
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