Meisterfleisch reorganizes its overnight delivery service

The customer

Meisterfleisch is a subsidiary of the METRO Group and produces high-quality meat and sausage products in the swabian town of Gäufelden. MEISTER is known with “MEISTER” as its own brand and with “real - QUALITY”, “Horeca Select”, “TIP” and “aro” as METRO's own brands.

The general contractor

MFI GmbH has been planning and implementing conveyor, storage and order picking systems as a general contractor in various industries at home and abroad since 1994. In addition to conveyor technology components developed and built in-house, MFI also utilizes the expertise of its partner BINDER Fördertechnik in the pallet sector.

The high quality of the pallet conveyor technology in combination with the MFI control system produces the best results.

The task

The company Meister feines Fleisch - feine Wurst GmbH decided to expand the shipping capacities at the Gäufelden plant due to a sharp increase in order volume. The plant produces meat and sausage products in 2-shift operation for the METRO Group's distribution centers.

However, deliveries to the stores and central warehouses for the sales divisions “real”, “SB-Warenhaus” and “METRO Cash&Carry Deutschland GmbH” are mainly made at night and in the early hours of the morning.

Connecting the newly planned shipping hall to the production area was not easy, as the shipping pallets had to be transported from the production area at one end of the plant to the new shipping hall at the other end. Of course, the cold chain for the sensitive goods must not be interrupted during transportation.

Internal transportation through the organically grown production building had to be ruled out from the outset, as this would disrupt the sensitive production processes.

The solution

Together with MFI GmbH, the general contractor responsible for planning and controlling the material flow technology, among other things, we developed the routing and design of the pallet conveyor technology.

In the production area, the pallets are loaded onto the conveyor system using pallet trucks and reach a tunnel on the roof of the production building via a first vertical conveyor, which has a height of 6,500 mm and carries pallets weighing up to 1,200 kg. Approx. 60 m of roller conveyors and a turntable are installed in the tunnel so that the pallets can always be conveyed in a longitudinal direction.

The temperature in the roof tunnel is kept constant at 0-5°C so as not to interrupt the cold chain. A special feature is that the conveyor line is also used as a buffer area for shipping in order to relieve the shipping warehouse.

At the end of the conveyor line, the pallets run through a fire protection gate onto the second vertical conveyor, which conveys the load down into the dispatch hall. After any interim storage in the shipping racks, the pallets are loaded onto the trucks. Both temperature control and use as a buffer area made a special design and enclosure of the conveyor bridge necessary.

Special challenges

The installation and assembly of the two vertical conveyors posed a particular challenge. A mobile crane with a boom of approx. 70m and a lifting capacity of 100t was required to bring the equipment in through an opening in the roof. The opening was almost exactly in the middle of the roof of the extensive building. This required precision work, meticulous preparation and perfect, almost blind, cooperation between the crane operator and our installation personnel.