Marel Australia and Nippon Meat Packers, Australia, recently signed a contract for a new Meat Deboning Flowline. Scheduled for installation in August 2004 the new Marel system is designed to process 1200-1400 cattle a day. The line consists of four flowlines, each 50 meters long. The sale of this system is an important milestone for Marel as it is the largest flowline solution delivered so far, with ten times the capacity of previous systems.

Hideki Kanai, Nippon Head Engineer, Jim Vick, Plant Manager and Sigsteinn Gretarsson, Manager of Marel Australia.

Nippon Meat Packers have already started the construction of a new facility in Australia, exclusively designed for the new Marel Deboning Flowline system. The solution from Marel was in part selected because of its automatic individual traceability features. Traceability was imperative for Nippon Meat Packers due to the recent BSE issues in Japan, but the company sells most of its products there.

The system provides a real-time overview of every single carcass that goes through the plant as well as individual worker performance monitoring. Thus, the meat product can be traced back to the farm and back to each worker. The system monitors and evaluates the yield and throughput of each worker giving management a good overview over the entire operation.

The contract with Nippon Meat Packers is a result of increased marketing effort in Australia that started with the opening of Marel's subsidiary in Brisbane in 2001.