A KIWI GATEWAY TO
EUROPE AND BEYOND
When I started my plans for
34 MAY 2018
covering the ever-impressive
Anuga FoodTec trade
show in Germany, I envisaged reporting
on some of the very latest trends
within the European food processing
market.
That will happen, later.
But after racking more than 40,000km
in the air via Hong Kong and Singapore,
in excess of 50,000 steps per
day on the FitBit, and having my eyes
blown wide open by the 1700 exhibitors
that spanned some
500,000 cubic feet in space, all the
numbers boiled down to ‘2’. That
was the number – in total – of Kiwi
companies exhibiting at the show.Yes,
Milmeq and Cuddon Freeze Dry did
the Kiwi flag proud and they took their
companies’ offerings to the world and
European stages (Nb: Cuddon Freeze
Dry is a division of Cuddon Limited
that also includes 80-year-old-this-year
Cuddon Engineering).You may wonder,
‘why?’, perhaps thinking about your
own business operation and how the
addition of an international show of
this magnitude could impact on your
agenda - all simply too much effort?
But, as Milmeq’s Mike Lee and Cuddon’s
John Cuddon explain, opportunity
is plenty… and that’s why.
Milmeq specialises in automatic carton
chilling and freezing systems for meat,
poultry and dairy processors around
the world.
“Forty years ago Milmeq pioneered
the introduction of automatic chilling
and freezing tunnels to the meat and
dairy industries, and today our tunnels
are recognised worldwide for their
performance and reliability. In the
1980s we introduced large scale plate
freezers to the meat industry. With the
ability to halve freezing times, our plate
freezers have revolutionised freezing
operations for processors in Australasia
and we are now seeing interest in
them around the world,” Lee says.
From a Milmeq perspective, in Australia,
New Zealand and other regions
the company has seen automation
happening particularly in the chilling
and freezing space.
“We operate in both the meat and
dairy sector. In dairy, we have clearly
seen automation progressively occur
over the past 20 years, backed by
some major investment, and we see
meat progressively moving through an
automation process too.”
Lee says the move to automation
is being driven by significant labour
ANUGA FOODTEC
By Food Technology’s publisher, Greg Robertson