Counting peas made easy

At Amidori, winweb-food optimizes the flow of goods for a plant-based food product

Water, pea protein isolate and pea fibre, spices and spice extracts, rapeseed oil, oat flour, potato starch and salt: that is Midori, a plant-based food product without soya. Protein producer Amidori manages its production from goods receipt through to dispatch with winweb-food.

Together with the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging in Munich, Friedrich Büse developed a method for producing plant-based foods. In 2015, the trained butcher and chef, whose parents ran their own butcher’s shop, subsequently founded the company Amidori with the Wedel family, who were friends of his, and had modern production facilities built at two locations: Wals-Siezenheim near Salzburg and Stegaurach near Bamberg. Winweb Informationstechnologie GmbH soon became involved, developing industry-specific ERP software for the food industry, with a particular focus on the meat industry.

Amidori has similar production steps and guidelines for example on traceability to a meat processing company. “It was therefore not so difficult for us to adapt to Amidori’s specific requirements,” says Winweb Managing Director Willi von Berg.
First, employees in Stegaurach order the raw materials in winweb-food according to current order requirements. In production in Wals, Austria, the ordered ingredients are then delivered from across Europe, inspected for quantity and quality, recorded in goods receipt and assigned a batch number . In the next step, the protein powder, which has so far been produced mainly from peas, is weighed in the ERP system according to the customer specific recipes : with starch powder, various spices and, if requested by the customer, gluten as well.

If the weighed contents do not match the weight stored in the system, winweb-food reports an error. If both match, however, all ingredients are blended in a mixer, weighed into bulk bags and fitted with a loop label. Before entering the extruder, the bulk bags are registered in the system again and the mixture is vacuumed out for processing with oil and water using pressure and heat. After cooling, the raw material is cut into pre-cut, natural products in strand or sheet form, packaged, assembled on pallets, marked as complete in the system and chilled or frozen. Quantities for bulk consumers are packed directly in Wals in 200 kg bulk bags on pallets and delivered deep-frozen to various end customers. The quantity requested by the German site in Stegaurach is delivered just in time by a freight forwarder in order to process customer orders accordingly.
In Stegaurach, all incoming goods are recorded in the system upon delivery and posted to the appropriate warehouse. Production orders are then created based on stored recipes, recorded during material preparation, posted to daily batches and made available for further processing in E2 crates or stack-and-nest containers. At the beginning and end of each process, the goods are weighed again and labels are printed to identify the exact contents of each crate. In production, the raw material is therefore scanned and posted to the various production lines which produce a range of variants: finely chopped, mince-like Midori, „pulled“ Midori, marinated products, Midori strips, breaded or fried. „We process Midori exactly as our customers want it and therefore have to be very flexible“, explains Christian Wicht, Head of Production, Engineering & IT. At the same time, however, Amidori produces on an industrial scale and must of course ensure traceability As a result, every individual production step is registered in advance in the ERP system and marked as complete afterwards. Since some customers are based in Scandinavia, Amidori holds IFS Food and BRC certification – a requirement for its international customers.

The finished goods are weighed and labeled again. In the cleanroom, which can only be entered through two airlocks, the finished Midori is packaged on a packaging line in different deep-drawn trays depending on the product, onto which the batch number and best-before date are printed. As is customary in meat processing businesses, the finished product is inspected by a metal detector and weighed once more. If there are no issues, cardboard sleeves are labeled from winweb-food according to the customer’s requirements and manually fitted around the deep-drawn trays. The finished packs are also provided with a carton label and packed onto pallets. Due to specific customer requirements, the product- and batch segregated pallets are provided with shipping-unit labels, stored or shipped directly.
Amidori had been able to rely on comprehensive support from Winweb during the implementation and subsequent adaptation of our processes, said Christian Wicht. The next step would be to improve future projections, because in process and volume planning, his company had significantly more requirements and more complex workflows than a meat processing business.

Amidori Food Company GmbH & Co. KG was founded in April 2015 in Stegaurach near Bamberg by former butcher and trained chef Friedrich Büse and the Wedel family, who were friends of his. Under the name Midori, the company produces alternatives to meat products from protein-rich raw materials such as pulses and grains. Amidori currently employs around 130 people at two locations. In 2019, the company plans to offer its products at the fresh food counters of various retailers across Europe for the first time

www.amidori.com
www.winweb.de