DanePork building a new facility

The Danish company DanePork A/S, a privately held meat processing company previously known as Slagtergården St. Lihme, is in the process of building a new slaughtering facility for pigs. After several years of rebuilding the cutting, deboning and packing part of the plant as well as the completely new fully automatic carcass storage, which cost over €20 million in investments, it is now time for the ‘front side’ of the plant to be renewed.

The new slaughter hall is designed to meet the latest standards of hygiene, COVID-19 ‘new normal’ employee rules and routines throughout the buildings, and animal welfare standards, with automated walkways for the livestock.

In the construction of the plant, all energy saving possibilities have been taken into account in order to meet the carbon neutral requirements.

Unloading of pigs from the supplier truck will be done inside a closed area, and storage of pigs in pens of 15 pigs each allows for very low-stress transportation towards the stunning area.

The runways will be automated and protected from overloading. The Butina CO₂ stunner is sized with maximum space allowance inside the gondolas, with holding groups of five pigs each.

Scalding and dehairing of pigs will be done according to the newly designed ‘low and slow’ principle of vertical scalding by means of spray water circulation, followed by a large U-bar set of dehairing machines. After gambrelling and grading, the pigs get a final polishing treatment before arriving in the evisceration hall, without any manual shaving or cleaning requirements.

The evisceration hall will be equipped with all of Marel’s M-Line robotics kill floor automation program, including the newly designed Leaf Lard Remover robot. This M-Line robot removes all leaf lard without damaging diaphragm or tenderloin fillets. With this robotic process, many employee conditions improve, and because of the M-Line TwinTool for continuous sterilization the enterobacteria count decreases considerably.

All in all, this will be a state-of-the-art plant operated according to the highest standards, and a trendsetter for the red meat industry.