Cargill Invests at French Texturizing Plant

The investments reinforce Cargill’s position in the extremely competitive market for food additives, particularly texturizing ingredients such as thickeners and gellifiers.

1/11/2011 --- Cargill has made significant investments at its hydrocolloids and functional systems production plant in Baupte, France. The equipment includes a brand new centralized control room and a bag filling line, both fitted with the most modern systems and machinery. The investments underline Cargill’s long-term commitment to maintain and upgrade its activities in Baupte and are part of the group’s overall modernization strategy for the site. The investments reinforce Cargill’s position in the extremely competitive market for food additives, particularly texturizing ingredients such as thickeners and gellifiers.

“The new centralized control room and bagging line illustrate the profound change in our operational organization in Baupte over the past months. Today, we can work more efficiently, while at the same time improving working conditions for our employees and offering them higher valued tasks,” said Fabrice Bohin, Cargill global business line director, hydrocolloids. “For instance the centralized control room, from which all the different production workshops can be monitored, has allowed us to eliminate a number of manual tasks such as palette handling, making work much less arduous overall. At the same time, our control room technicians can now oversee all operations in progress and perform more complex and enriching tasks, while ensuring a high level of quality.”

The bagging line, which replaces the carton box packing line, offers several advantages. It improves security and work environment for Cargill employees (by reducing noise, dust and arduous tasks). It also helps reduce Cargill’s environmental impact, since a bag generates 100 g of waste, versus 1 kilogram for a box.

Beyond those two major technological improvements, the modernization efforts over the past months also focused on logistics and maintenance. An internal logistics organization has been created, grouping a number of tasks formerly split over different departments on the site (orders processing, stocks, transports, customs, etc). The new highly professional system put into place will improve the performance, quality and speed of productions and shipments, while also creating added value jobs for all involved employees. On the maintenance side, a new system has been devised and implemented in order to allow better anticipation and monitoring of possible breakdowns.

Cargill’s Baupte site produces hydrocolloids (carrageenan, xanthan gum, scleroglucan) and multi-component functional systems, which are part of Cargill’s unrivalled portfolio of texture ingredients, also including alginates, locust bean gum and pectin, cultures & enzymes, lecithin, starch and soy proteins. Baupte also hosts Cargill’s global R&D center for hydrocolloids, as well as the group’s second largest applications center in Europe.