ESKORT has given a vote of confidence to the South African economy – in spite of domestic headwinds – with a huge expansion of its food production facility in Heidelberg, the small town where the company has produced pork products for 70 years.
The leading pork manufacturer yesterday unveiled its new 10 000m² development in Heidelberg, which has expanded its Gauteng production capacity by 50% and will drive hi-tech efficiencies in its production.
The enlarged factory is equipped with the largest continuous box freezer in Africa, capable of freezing 120 000kg of products to minus-18°C every 24 hours.
Boxes move on a conveyor belt through the freezing chamber where the air is kept at minus-41°C – a temperature that occurs naturally only in polar regions.
Chilled and frozen warehouses in Heidelberg now have multi-level picking mezzanine floor systems, the first of their kind in the food industry in South Africa.
These systems maximise vertical space by including mezzanine floors that create additional levels for storage and picking, and they allow Eskort to handle a high volume of orders quickly and efficiently.
Eskort CEO Arnold Prinsloo said the core objective of the factory extension was to create efficiencies.
Prinsloo said Eskort realised it had to expand its slaughter line as it wanted to increase its capacity to slaughter 6 000 pigs a week and to 9 000 pigs a week.
“We are currently slaughtering 6 500 pigs, and by the end of the year we'll be doing 7 500 pigs. With the killing line or the slaughtering line expansion, obviously we had to improve or increase our chilling line. So we closed our deboning line, made it a chiller facility and moved the deboning line onwards,” Prinsloo said.
“So in this deboning line we can process 180 tons of meat or debone 180 tons of meat per day. That's an equivalent of 30 elephants.”
Prinsloo said a big part of this expansion includes the addition of carcass chillers as well as the installation of a huge box freezer to accommodate the influx of raw material.
“This addition doubles our chilled and frozen cold stores, resulting in efficient picking and staging areas and allowing us to eliminate outsourcing costs, and our deboning lines have increased in size to meet the ever-rising demand. We also have new dispatch areas and loading bays to maximise productivity,” he said.
“Lastly, we added 3 000 pallet spaces to our cold store and our chilling rooms, and we've got a very fancy mezzanine area where we’re going to do picking which we saw in England and we copied that and improved it a bit.”
The opening of the factory extension marked the next phase of growth for a company started in the small KwaZulu-Natal Midlands town of Estcourt in 1917.
The factory extension is a sign of Eskort’s resilience, adaptability and vision, and testament to the efficacy of the leadership lessons it has absorbed over more than a century.
Eskort’s farmers are shareholders in the company, its pork is antibiotic-free, and a massive investment in biosecurity – backed by international and local certification – means its premium export-quality products enjoy the trust of consumers throughout South Africa.
“It's a high health herd, what they call a high health herd. So they're very healthy pigs. The genetics come from Holland and Norway. The company is called Topigs Norsvin,” Prinsloo said.
“That’s the genetics company. They supply our farmers with genetics. And then our farmers supply us with the pigs. The farmers are shareholders of the business.”
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