Meat&Poultry - August 2011 - 49

Breakthrough Disinfection
The test kitchen is easily accessible to both the Retail and Foodservice Presentation Rooms.

it more efficient, decrease steps to increase functionality,” he says. “We can have 30-35 people working here in the kitchen.” An adjacent photo studio serves both an internal and customer purpose. “When we do a work session with a customer and we have to take photos of the finished products, we take the product from the kitchen, take photos back here and our customers walk away at the end of the day with all the work we did captured on a CD,” Eilert says. The 11,000-sq.-ft., brightly lit pilot production plant boasts an open design for flexibility. “Our previous pilot plant had many small rooms,” Eilert says. “Now, if we need to bring in a full-scale production line to do early prototype testing, we can do it. “Windows offer views into the various rooms along our tour hall,” he adds. “If people need to see our capabilities, they can do so in a very convenient fashion. They can see our labs and pilot plant at work through windows – and don’t have to suit up and go into the various rooms unless necessary.” Team members in the tenderness and texture lab were doing shear analysis testing for products in Cargill’s Guaranteed Tender and Verified Tender programs during the tour. Allison Turner and James Mendoza , analytical lab technicians, sliced sampled product and put it on the texture analyzer to measure shear force. “We put this area right off the pilot plant because we’ll prep the samples in the pilot plant, utilize that space and then it’s an easy flow into this facility,” Eilert says.

The center was in the fi nal stages of installing smokehouses during the tour. “We designed it the same way we designed our large production facilities,” Eilert says. “The raw side is separated from the ready-to-eat side – different colored floors, entrances for each region and air supplies. We have four single-prep smokehouses plus capabilities for continuous cooking and processing.” Shelf-life testing is done using six refrigerated cases that can be set at different temperatures and under different lighting. “This area is focused on confirming and validating shelf-life of a product,” Eilert says. “This area features a lot of flexibility, which is critical due to our diverse customer base.” Formulation work for designing seasoning blends for Cargill or its customers is done in the seasoning blends and ingredients room where all stocks of base ingredients and specialty ingredients are stored. Work in the general microbiology lab next to the shelf-life cooler focuses on studying the spoilage characteristics of products – whether team members are creating a new product or changing an existing product. The total analytical area contains 10 technicians in chemistry and microbiology labs. The micro lab staff totals seven people. About 1,500 technology people are employed at Cargill worldwide. The chemistry lab does nutrition testing, methods development around chemical analysis and cost analysis. Lab workers determine the initial nutrient composition for Cargill and customer products and attempt to introduce new testing methodologies. “For example, we are working hard to increase the utilization of Near Infrared Spectroscopy in our operational laboratories in order to measure product composition and quality,” Eilert says. “We will do such work here and scale it to our larger plants.”

For these applications:
Meat brine chillers. Poultry chillers. Other poultry processing. RTE disinfecting rinses. Other process water.

How we do it:
Our exclusive patented catalytic process. Powerful SuperOxidants™ generated from the process water itself.

Other bene ts:
Automated operation. No expensive chemicals to buy. No chemical dosing headaches. No restrictive chemical contracts. Compact installation. Exclusive real-time disinfection ef cacy estimate.

To learn more, please contact:

Dave Wildes VP of Sales 608-838-0300 dwildes@bioionix.com

BioIonix, Inc.
4603 Triangle St. McFarland, WI 53558 608-838-0300

www.bioionix.com

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Meat&Poultry - August 2011

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