Early this month, a select group from Westaway Sausages took the train from Tiverton to Frankfurt for 4 nights. Our mission was to learn more about our industry, to make friends, collaborate and share our enthusiasm for sausages (and beer). We went to the World’s largest trade fair for meat and meat alternatives production with every type of machine, ingredient, and packaging that you might imagine.
Friends
We met other manufacturers not just from the UK like Pilgrim Food Masters (Richmond Sausages) but also from around the world like Farmers Choice in Kenya, and Australian British Food Holdings in Perth. We met key partners who have helped us innovate on certified compostable packaging, key machinery suppliers shared their thinking on demand led production, key ingredient suppliers showed us the innovation that will lead to us using less additives in the future.
Sustainability was at the heart of most conversations.
Initiatives we are progressing because of our trip
– Making better use of our machines and looking after them better. We bought a mincer in 2003 that over the years has produced some 27,000 tonnes of pork mince. We sold it recently for twice what we paid for it.
-Using our machines to do more things, we saw things we did not think were possible.
-Extending the information our equipment can capture and provide on yield, throughput, and traceability.
-Discussing how meat products might be made in the future.
-Reviewing new machines that increase the kg per hour using the same or less labour.
-Considering new machines that use less materials or resources.
-Meeting new contacts and discussing how we might remove sulphites and phosphates from our recipes.
-Reviewing new approaches that reduce the life cycle assessment (LCA) of making our sausages.
-Considering a new approach on packaging which provides for nesting and optimises space.
We dreamt
Sometimes you must admit that you do not know the solution to a particular problem. One issue has consistently frustrated us. How to make a range of sausages daily but running these small batches with the efficiency of a continuous process.
As we walked around the show, we came up with a project to address this issue by using a mixture of Artificial Intelligence and parallel 3 arm delta robots. This might take 18 months of planning but at least we now have a concept.
If you are serious about being sustainable, I recommend that you must get out of your comfort zone!