Beef is one of the most popular food items globally. In fact, consumers around the world eat more than 129 billion pounds of beef per year. That’s a lot of burgers, steaks, ribs and roasts!
Keeping pace with consumers’ appetite for safe, high quality, delicious and affordable beef products year-round is no easy task. Fresh and frozen product needs to arrive in good quality at the end of a supply chain. This includes constant cold storage, processing, shipping, handling, transportation, stacking and display. As it is a complex and labor-intensive process, farmers, processors and retailers are looking for solutions to optimize efficiency, costs and sustainability.
Already used successfully by retailers in Europe, IFCO’s shared and reusable meat containers are now taking hold in South America. La Anónima, one of Argentina’s largest grocery retailers, recently converted from single-use packaging to meat RPCs.
Founded in 1908, La Anónima operates 159 grocery locations, nine distribution centers and one transfer base in 80 cities throughout the Argentine territory, from Goya to Ushuaia. The company recently opened a 200,000 square meter, highly automated meat packing facility in General Pico, La Pampa, and wanted to find a new packaging system to optimize quality, freshness, food safety, efficiency and sustainability for its meat packing operation.
The facility processes 25000 tons of beef and other meat cuts, like minced meat, annually. That includes more than 20,000 head of Angus steers per month, and meat exports to more than a half dozen countries, including, Germany, Brazil and Israel.
After extensive packaging research and conversations with IFCO experts, La Anónima, switched to IFCO RPC Meat Lift Locks for all of its pre-packaged beef products. Since August 2018, IFCO supplies the retailer with 60,000 meat RPCs per month – or more than 720,000 crates per year.
La Anónima needed a standardized packaging solution that is sturdy and operates well as part of its new, 100% automated, meat packing operation that handles hundreds of thousands of shipments annually. IFCO meat RPCs were the perfect match.
They are designed to work "hand in glove" within automated retailer systems, facilitating smooth operations, while maximizing efficiency and minimizing costs associated with "down time." In addition, they reduce customers’ environmental footprint along the entire meat supply chain.
IFCO’s rigorous cleaning process leaves all RPCs hygienically clean and ready for the next order. As part of the circular supply chain this reduces carbon emissions and waste.
“Our switch to IFCO RPC Meat Lift Lock is instrumental to our success now and in the future.”
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