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Clemens Food Group’s Vision Becomes a Reality

The newest hog processing plant built in the United States in over a decade processes 10,300 hogs per shift and 2.6 million per year in a state-of-the-art facility focused on product quality and safety.

More than 800 employees currently work on one shift at Clemens Food Group’s massive new hog processing facility in Coldwater, Michigan. Photo by Mike Gorecki.
More than 800 employees currently work on one shift at Clemens Food Group’s massive new hog processing facility in Coldwater, Michigan. Photo by Mike Gorecki.

Imagine deciding to build a new food plant years before you determined the source of your raw materials supply. Then, imagine choosing your new plant startup date three years in advance and actually achieving startup on the exact date. 

While it may seem like a pipe dream, it’s a reality at Clemens Food Group’s new 650,000-sq-ft hog processing facility in Coldwater, Michigan. With startup in September 2017, Clemens’ Coldwater facility was honored at the ProFood Live! conference in June as one of ProFood World’s 2018 Manufacturing Innovation Award winners. 

“How we began this project is a little bit different than some other industries,” states Eric Patton, vice president of operations for Clemens Food Group. The Hatfield, Pennsylvania-based pork processor saw an opportunity in Michigan, which would allow hog producers to keep their products local and not haul hogs a significant distance out of state. 

At the same time, Clemens needed a larger hog supply for further processing at its existing facility in Pennsylvania. Before the Coldwater facility was built, hogs were leaving Michigan and heading to Indiana or Kentucky for harvesting. Today, hogs are supplied to Coldwater in a 200-mile radius from three states.

“To maintain the growth of value-added products, we had to expand our raw materials supply,” Patton explains. Because its customers value control of raw materials, Clemens did not want to buy products on the open market for the new plant, he states. At its headquarters plant located about 30 miles north of Philadelphia, Clemens processes 90 percent of the available local hogs and produces value-added products, such as hams, bologna, bacon and sausages. The new Coldwater site has no further processing and produces fresh meats, such as pork cuts, butts, loins, hams and bellies, with the other cuts going to Hatfield for further processing. 

“If you look at the technologies, equipment and process we put in place, it’s all geared toward product quality,” says Randy Zorn, general manager of Clemens’ Coldwater facility. “Certainly, snap chills and equilibration bays have always been in the industry, but the processes we put in place are much more fine-tuned, [along with] the tonnage of refrigeration and succinct control of carcass temperature.”

Using snap chill technology, Clemens is able to achieve temperature targets rapidly and control product shrink in the coolers. “We are getting shrink levels that are very favorable without having to put any kind of water on the carcasses,” Zorn adds.

Key aspects of design

Drivers who deliver the hogs never enter the facility, and trucks are washed on site after delivery. Renowned livestock expert Temple Grandin helped design the hog receiving system, clear up to the CO2 stunning, says Zorn. Grandin also verified that the process was built to her specifications. 

Fully inspected and approved hog carcasses enter a -25°F snap chill freezer for 90 minutes. The freezer includes a 3,128-ft chain, which is the longest and fastest in the world. From there, the carcasses go through an equilibration cooler, equipped with automated sortation, where they rest for 24 hours. The refrigeration system in the equilibration cooler is a patented chilling system that minimizes meat shrinkage. This process ensures only .5 percent shrinkage or less to maintain moisture in the meat. Additionally, the equilibration cooler helps maintain the proper color of the meat.

At the Coldwater facility, all the trimmings and waste from the harvest floor are gathered through an extensive vacuum system and sent to the rendering area. Here, the trimmings are turned into dry meal and grease, using Haarslev processing technology. This equipment was coordinated in the design phase of the project through 3-D modeling, according to Bharath Singh, project director at Gray Construction, Clemens’ engineering management partner on the project.

Several key aspects that Clemens sought during the facility design were reducing the manual labor of lifting heavy boxes, reducing congestion of powered industrial truck traffic and improving the integrity of product packaging. A fully automated material handling system was designed to transport empty boxes to pack stations and then transport full boxes away from the pack stations to a fully automated weigh label and sealing operation, with six machines from Sealed Air in place. 

Full pallets are conveyed into the automated refrigerated and storage warehouses, where mechanical cranes induct them into racks for storage awaiting shipment orders. Once ordered for shipment, the cranes automatically retrieve the desired pallets and convey them to the dock for loading on carriers for shipment. 

The facility includes five packaging lines with 26 separate packaging stations, providing increased flexibility. Six case erectors feed the pack stations, where, once boxed, 20,000 or more cases per shift are moved on a conveyor system to the label mezzanine for automatic weighing, sealing and labeling operations. 

The boxes then travel to the accumulation and sortation mezzanine, where fresh meat is sent for palletizing and to the automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) cooler. The boxes with frozen meat go to the GEA variable retention time (VRT) freezer that is customized for various products with different chilling and freezing profiles. This freezing process typically takes 24 hours or less, while traditional systems require 48-72 hours. “By embracing VRT, Clemens is able to respond more quickly to market demand, lower its inventory, reduce product loss and decrease labor costs since the system is automated,” according to Jeff Scott, senior project manager at Gray Construction.

The AS/RS is nine positions high, consists of more than 7,000 positions in inventory, is serviced by five cranes, provides a smaller overall footprint, and allows Clemens to store and retrieve finished product with minimal human intervention. The large freezer system is designed to allow product to be shuffled automatically during off hours, ensuring for automatic optimization for first in, first out storage and retrieval. The design also has the potential for automatic inventory checking based on the unique design of the transfer systems, providing material handling management all the way to the dock.

Automation gains lower labor costs

At the Coldwater facility, equipment and software integration is tied from the plant floor to the business office. Production orders are downloaded daily from the main enterprise resource planning system to the automation layer, which allows for automated delivery of necessary products around the facility, according to Walker Mattox, president of GraySolutions, a sister company to Gray Construction. Constant communication with the warehouse management system provides inventory synchronization, delivering real-time information for sales and production teams.

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