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Automating pet food production


Daifuku helps GA Pet Food Partners create a world-class manufacturing facility with collaborative automation


apanese factory automation specialist Daifuku has been instrumental in creating Europe’s most-advanced production plants dedicated to making high-quality own-label pet food. One of its clients is Lancashire-based GA Pet Food Partners, which produces over 80,000 tonnes of complete dog and cat food for its 2,500 customers globally, consisting of some 930 diff erent products. Being able to manage such complexity whilst maintaining the highest food standards is mostly attributed to its adoption of best-in-class technology, which includes four fully-automated fork-lift trucks (called ‘Henrys’), high bay storage and retrieval systems, sorting transfer vehicles, conveyors and three huge automated guided vehicles (camels) named Snap, Crackle and Pop. Daifuku has been specifi cally responsible for the design and installation of the storage and retrieval systems in the Pantry and Larder Store within the Ingredients Kitchen area (see image above) of the GA Pet Foods’s facility. This solution comprises 12 automated cranes (six in each chamber), with associated racking, which creates 21,000 unique storage locations. These are used to store raw ingredients and fi nished products in the Pantry/Larder Store respectively, prior to transportation (by the camels) to the extrusion facility, where the fi nished dry pet food is formed. All of the warehouse systems are controlled by Daifuku’s WCS partner Invar.


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GA Pet Foods’s Pantry and Larder Store within the Ingredients Kitchen area


journey, we made it clear to potential technology partners that we wanted to create a collaborative team, where dialogue could take place among all of our automation partners. We wanted this to be a quality-driven process and not one that focused solely on the lowest cost.” “Having now opened our fully- automated Ingredients Kitchen, the results speak for themselves. We believe this operation sets new global standards for not just pet food production, but also human food processing – especially in the areas of traceability and operational effi ciency.”


Collaboration is key


Five years in planning and four years in development, the GA Pet Food Partners’s operation at Chorley, Lancashire, represents the best in automation technology and an ongoing partnership. Chairman of GA Pet Food Partners, Roger Bracewell, was determined to fi nd the best automation providers to work on the project, as long as they were able to work together as a single team: “From the outset of our automation


18 October 2022 | Automation


Extruder efficiency Interestingly, GA Pet Food Partners’s automation investment strategy has been underpinned by its adoption of sales and operational planning principles. Russell Hutchinson, business


development manager at Daifuku, explains: “While so many businesses nowadays adopt a lean manufacturing strategy, the team at GA have taken time to really understand their operation, and realised that ‘lean’ is not the right approach for them. For the plant in Lancashire it’s all about keeping the main extruder


working to maximum capacity. The team subsequently invested in the upstream element of their supply chain, with the ultimate objective of improving the extruder’s effi ciency.” For GA Pet Food Partners, automation has not been about labour saving or cost cutting. Moreover, technology has enabled the business to increase output by 30%, improve overall plant effi ciency (achieving an improvement of 15% in extrusion uptime) and maintain world-class quality standards. The use of leading-edge automation has also enabled the company to remain fl exible – one of its key areas of competitive advantage within the global pet food production sector. This has all be done without any increase in headcount at the facility.


Having opened the fully automated


production facility this summer, the next project on GA’s agenda is its fi nished packaging line, which will further improve its service levels to its customers.


https://ga-petfoodpartners.co.uk CONTACT:


GA Pet Food Partners


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