TEXT: WIEBE VAN DER SLUIS
PHOTO: DIETRICH HACKENBERG
One new machine provided many functional improvements ‘Automation and digitalisation have helped us keep our company and staff fit and employees willing to stay.’ That is how egg packing station owner Thomas Determeyer looks at his German operation. The purchase of a new egg grader/packer supported his vision.
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he company Owi-Ei in Rietberg (Westphalia, Germany) grades, picks and packs approximately 600,000 eggs a day and transports them to around 80 supermarkets in the region. ‘It was common to grade 16 hours a day, but now we’re down to ten hours’, says Thomas Determeyer. Ask him 94
about his new egg packer/grader and you get an enthusiastic story about processing speed, egg quality and worker satisfaction. After looking at many SANOVO machines throughout Europe, Determeyer replaced his existing Ardenta egg grader with a state-of-the-art Grader Pro 220 egg grader/packer at his egg packing station last year. Determeyer
proudly says, ‘The efficiency of this machine allows us to process many more eggs, to over 600,000, in fewer hours.’ Dealing with market complexity The German egg market is rather complex. On the production side, there is a wide variety of production systems and farm sizes, and consumer demand, too, is rather diverse. The result is a huge variation in egg input as well as output. Owi-Ei was running the grading centre with an Ardenta 12, a reliable machine but unable to achieve the increased capacity requirements. The company also wanted more focus on egg traceability, for which individual egg handling is
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