Meat&Poultry - March 2014 - 69

EQUIPMENT

ESSENTIALS * ADVERTORIAL

Keeping pace
Impingement-freezing technology gives sausage production a lift at Kayem Foods
No processor would knowingly make
a significant capital investment in a vital
piece of equipment only to trade it in
less than a year later with a newer, faster
version of a machine to achieve the same
process. But when the challenge involves
implementing technology designed to
keep up with demand for five to 10 years
and that demand is exceeded in five
to 10 months, most processors would
agree, that is an enviable challenge. This
is exactly what happened at Chelsea,
Mass.-based Kayem Foods Inc.
Founded in 1909 by Kazimierz
Monkiewicz, Kayem is still family owned
and has flourished beyond what was
once a regional customer base for its hot
dogs, Italian sausages, chicken sausages

"You don't normally put in some
technology and then upgrade it
a year later."
- Matt O'Malley, vice president of the sausage
division at Kayem Foods Inc.

and deli meats from its two plants. It
was at its Woburn-based, fresh-sausage
plant where demand for the company's
60-plus varieties of its al Fresco chicken
sausage led to the installation of a new,
nitrogen-chilled, tunnel-style freezer in
December of 2012, which was outgrown
just months later.
"Clearly, you don't normally put in
some technology and then upgrade
it a year later," says Matt O'Malley, vice
president of the sausage division at
Kayem Foods Inc. "But it was a good
problem to have."
Working with Linde North America,

Murray Hill, NJ,
engineers at the
plant collaborated
with the supplier
to design an in-line
freezing solution
to keep up with
increased production
of its chicken-based sausage links and
sausage burgers.
Once the realization was made
that the tunnel freezer throughput
challenges could be remedied with
impingement freezing technology, Linde
and Kayem experts set their collective
sites on implementing the solution.
Linde's impingement technology was
originally developed in the mid-1990s
as a solution for high-volume freezing
of ground beef patties. Nearly 20 years
later, the same impingement technology
minimizes the dehydration of products
while increasing operating efficiency

and freezing capacity, all with a footprint
that is one-third the size of traditional
freezers. For Kayem, impingement
technology addressed a pinch point in
the production line.
"We knew how we wanted the product
to finish, but we didn't know freezing the
way Linde did," says O'Malley. Offering the
highest freezing capacity per square foot
on the processing floor, the impingement
freezer gave Kayem the ability to double
production in the same space the almostnew tunnel freezer previously occupied in
the processing line.
A multiple stage pilot process was part
of the adaptation of the impingementfreezing technology. Initially, Kayem sent
its products to Linde's pilot plant near
Cleveland for testing and later, O'Malley
and Peter Monkiewicz, vice president
of operations, visited the site to witness
some of the product testing prior to the
installation at Kayem's Woburn facility.
Meat&Poultry - March 2014

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