The Duravant family of operating companies serve the food processing, packaging and material handling segments.
When Argentinian poultry processor Nutrisur switched from a manual system for the grading of whole birds to an automatic MARELEC weighing and grading line, the results soon spoke for themselves.
Previously, every operator had been using a scale to grade and control the weight of each individual box, so the main priority was to increase both capacity and productivity.
Following the production line’s installation, bags full of whole birds arrive at the weighing belt on the recently developed infeed belt with retractable flights. This guarantees a capacity of 125 birds per hour, with regular intervals between each of them. The sorting belt has 16 stations with low-angle batching bins to aid the gentle handling of the birds. A take-away conveyor under the sorting conveyor then delivers the boxes to the end of the line.
Eng. Jorge Gagliardi, Plant Manager at Nutrisur, Buenos Aires, Argentina comments:
“The installation was carried out over a long weekend of three days, which included bringing in the grader, assembly and start up. We started on the Saturday and by the following Tuesday we were grading and filling boxes of 20kg as though we had been using this equipment for years. The installation was fluent and we very quickly became familiar with the operation of the machine. We got very good assistance from both MARELEC and its local representative FoodTex. We did not face any difficulties.”
With the payback of the grader being dependent on the speed and accuracy of filling each box, the financial results have been spectacular. When Nutrisur’s operators were weighing manually, they gave away an average of 200g per box more than the precise MARELEC grader.
We started on the Saturday and by the following Tuesday we were grading and filling boxes of 20kg as though we had been using this equipment for years.
Jorge Gagliardi
Plant Manager
With many years of experience in the food industry, Nutrisur employs more than 160 people in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The company produces high-quality broilers and is detail-oriented right through from the beginning to the end of the process. Starting out in the fodder business in 1947, the third generation of this family-run company is now responsible for operations in the poultry feed plant and the processing plant. A firm believer that quality comes first, Nutrisur sees this as the differentiating attribute present in each of its products. It also represents the company’s greatest competitive edge. For this reason, all products are certified by SENASA (National Service of Agri-Food Health and Quality) under the required security standards to guarantee operational excellence throughout the whole production process, and to ensure the Nutrisur’s team wellbeing. Producing natural and high-quality products is what drives Nutrisur towards continuous improvement.
