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The Client

Linley Valley Pork is a brand of the Craig Mostyn Group in Western Australia. The company is the largest pork supplier in Western Australia and specialises in producing high quality, free range pork.

The Challenge

Previously, the company had been using blast freezers to freeze their product, but this process was relatively labour intensive and took up a lot of space on-site.

As part of the development of a new cool store facility, Linley Valley Pork approached us to provide plate freezers to increase their freezing capacity, reduce labour and floor-space requirements, and better control their product quality.

The quick freeze of plate freezers, and the resulting lowering in refrigeration index, was particularly important for the company’s offal products, as these are usually packed warm.

A particular challenge on this project was that Linley Valley packed product in three different sizes of carton. This is not usually compatible with plate freezing, as the standard requirement is to have all cartons be the same height to enable direct contact with the plates. However, a relatively slow throughput rate meant a solution was able to be developed.

Our Solution

Milmeq engineered a custom solution where the gap between the plates on the plate freezers could be adjusted in order to accommodate a range of carton sizes over the various levels.

Prior to entering the plate freezer, product is fed through a sortation system, where it is sorted into slugs of eight or nine of the same size carton and then conveyed to the plate freezer where our infeed system detects the carton size and assigns it to the appropriate level.

We supplied two, 14-level MILMEQ® Plate Freezer stacks which accommodate a total of 480 small, 320 medium and 1152 large cartons. We also designed the functional description for the sortation process.

The site has capacity for a third plate freezer stack to be installed, should Linley Valley Pork increase their throughput in the future.

The Result

Direct contact with the plates enables product in the plate freezers to be completely frozen within 21 hours. This delivers a significantly lower refrigeration index than blast freezing and improves the quality of Linley Valley Pork’s products, particularly its offal products.

Milmeq remains in contact with Linley Valley Pork to monitor the performance of the plate freezers and provide operator training for new staff.