Martinique Aviculture

MARTINIQUE AVICULTURE IN MARTINIQUE
Every day Martinique Aviculture, the leader in its market, produces graded eggs and egg products. For 25 years, the company has been the largest industrial scale producer of eggs in Martinique. It now covers more than 80% of local requirements. “We have 2 laying farms, one in Le François and the other in Le Vert-Pré. Between these two farms we have 160,000 laying hens out of the 200,000 on our island” states Bérangère Bonnetête, Co-Director of the company. At Martinique Aviculture there are 35 employees, most of whom work on the Le François site where the packing station and offices are located. The assets of this company are based on the quality of its staff, the quality of the production which meets Draconian specifications, the freshness of the eggs offered because most often they are on the shelves the day after being laid” indicates Bérangère Bonnetête.

This family business is moving forward: it always offers more products to the local markets: graded eggs in shells marketed as two brands (“Mavic” and “Bonnaire”), pasteurised liquid eggs and this year Martinique Aviculture offers a range of fresh crêpes in large retail outlets (Ovoconcept crêpe carousel). Dominique Dauchy, his children Bérangère and Jérôme and their colleague Mr. Pertand are dynamic, loyal OVOCONCEPT clients. In 2006, Martinique Aviculture began to equip itself with plastic trays, pallets and dividers as well as a tray washer. Apart from the savings in packaging, this step make it possible to go further and take the leap into automation from the start of this year…

The first choice in automating the Martinique Aviculture packing station concerned the automatic feed to the egg grader, a 36,000 eggs/hour Staalkat. In fact, as all the eggs are collected on plastic trays, pallets and dividers, it was possible to automate this workstation which was very arduous for operators. It therefore put in place a Junior one stack at a time depalletiser (with automatic stacking of dividers) with a stack transfer system to insert them onto the cleats of the conveyor of the Staalkat denester for the egg grader. This choice enabled a very small space to be used in the station, whilst ensuring the rate for the egg grader because this one stack at a time robot makes a 100% feed to the grader possible (capacity of up to 40,000 eggs/h).

Given the efficiency of this initial application, a rapid decision was made to continue the approach of automating the station. 2 other robots were put into service in July 2014. The first puts inserts in boxes at the outfeed of the film-wrapping machine. The second is an “OVOPAL 250”. As a result of conveyors collecting cases at all workstations in the station, it palletises all the product references. The boxing cell fills the boxes with inserts of all formats. There are 2 boxes being filled in the cell. When these are full, an operator removes them and replaces them with 2 empty boxes. The case palletisation unit, an “OVOPAL 250” makes it possible to process up to 5 pallets with 5 different references. The type of case is identified using a barcode system specific to each product. The case is identified at the palletiser infeed and then placed on the corresponding pallet. This robot makes it possible to process 250 cases per hour. All the robotised cells self-operate and self-configure using a simple, user-friendly touch screen, which allows very rapid familiarisation for the operators.

”We have naturally turned to these innovative solutions firstly to improve working conditions for our staff, and secondly improve our productivity and consequently our profitability” stresses Bérangère Bonnetête.

In 2015 and 2016, 2 Junior palletisation robots were installed on the 2 Martinique Aviculture production sites.

In 2017, an OVOMULTICASER robot for packing trays in cases, with automatic case erection, was added to the robots already present at Martinique Aviculture.