PET Food Processing - September 2018 - 22

PLANT PROFILE

"Private brands provide retailers a sense
of control over their footsteps and helps
drive loyalty with their customers."
Heather Govea, C.J. Foods

A productivity
efficiency system
helps C.J. Foods
balance extruder
capacity with
packaging capacity.

managing air flow plant wide. "The air comes into the
cleanest part of the plant which is your finished-product
warehouse and flows through to the other end of the
plant where your raw materials are coming in," Krehbiel
says. Friesel adds, "There is a tremendous amount of air
coming into the plant and it all makes its way backwards
through the process. From the packaging room to the
dryer room to extrusion and then out of the building."
C.J. Foods also intentionally manages the access and
flow of people. BP30 was designed with three separate
entrances and break rooms, only two people per shift
have access to the raw materials and meat rooms and
when touring the plant, visitors can only look into these
two rooms through windows. The raw meat room also
has its own separate air flow system.
"We've taken a much more intentional approach to
containing the product and having it less exposed or
accessible to minimize as much as possible that a human being or something in the air could contaminate
the product," Krehbiel says. The segmentation sets PB30
apart from more typical extrusion systems.
Suppliers for the dry pre-mix ingredients provide justin-time delivery. Those raw, dry materials are conveyed
into the raw materials area which is a separate room

from the extruder. The meat room, which is also a separate room, processes frozen meat blocks into custom
slurries that, depending on the diet, can include multiple protein sources as well as fruits and vegetables. Raw
meat slurries are pumped into the raw materials room
and into the preconditioner along with the dry, pre-mix
ingredients and liquid oils and fats. The extruder sits
in a separate room one level below the preconditioner.
Extrusion operators have no exposure to ingredients in
their raw state.
The HorizonPSI pick-up hood system used to pneumatically convey the kibble off the end of the extruder
does not pull in air from the floor of the extruder room.
It pulls in clean air that goes through both a HEPA filter
and a burner as a microbial kill step before it comes in
and picks up the kibble and takes it to the dryer.
Kibble travels from the dryer through a dense phase
conveyance system to the coating room while it's still
hot to receive external coatings. Those coatings can be
fats, oils and dry powdered digest palatability enhancers.
Some products get either a liquid or a dry coating and
some products get both depending on the formula. The
coated kibble travels back into the dryer room through
a dense phase conveyance system and passes through a
vertical cooler that reduces the temperature of the kibble
down to the ambient temperature of the room. QA tests
at this point measure the density, the actual size of the
kibble, the moisture content, the water activity of the
kibble and the temperature of the kibble.
An Eriez vibratory conveyor with a magnetic separator transfers the product out of the cooler and drops it
into yet another dense phase system that ultimately delivers that kibble to one of the packaging bins. A different ingredient can be stored in each bin including freeze
dried inclusions that have been high pressure pasteurized. A combination of the stored ingredients can be
added in specific percentages to the conveyor that runs
underneath those bins. Once the product goes from this
conveyer through the dense phase to the packaging line,
it's fully blended.

Packaging calls the shots
Packaging capacity determines the plant capacity. Justin-time delivery of packaging materials, a wide variety

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PET Food Processing - September 2018

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