Project goal and implementation

For over 50 years the Italian food company Valle Spluga SpA have been producing poultry of excellence. The chicken are free to roam in the large spaces close to the Alps, enjoying clear fresh water and mountain air with a diet of plant based food like maize, soya and wheat. The poultry “Galletto Vallespluga” is a famous brand in Europe and stands for highest quality and contemporary rearing.

To ensure high quality standards Valle Spluga SpA decided to expand the historic production facility of Gordona. This involved a complete refurbishment of the production lines and the integration of two new sorting systems to guarantee high productivity. This is where Minebea Intec came in. The requirements for the weighing and sorting solution had to be strictly oriented to Valle Spluga's product portfolio. For decades, there has been three types of poultry on the market:

• - Galletto Vallespluga: weighing around 500 grams
• - Galletto Valtellina: weighing around 600 grams
• - Galletto Vallespluga in the net: weighing around 560 grams, destined mainly at gourmet stores and high end gastronomy

Valle Spluga SpA defined a high process speed as the overall requirement. At the same time, the entire system had to be extremely robust for intense daily cleaning processes. Minebea Intec installed two fully cladded weighing and sorting systems EWK 3010 with a standard throughput of over 100 pieces per minute. The EWK 3010 can reliably determine product weights from five grams. The six sorting points were defined at every 50 grams. Both sorters have IP66 and are connected to a monitoring system specifically developed for the customer. The software enables Valle Spluga SpA to control the two weight sorters, collect the weights of all products and integrate the information into their own SAP management for a complete traceability of the production and a resulting higher food safety for the end-consumer.

Case Studies [Minebea Intec]