Expansion to Increase Food Supply.

After partnering with Gray on the company’s first greenfield operation, a state-of-the-art production facility in Coldwater, Michigan, the customer again selected Gray to design and build the expansion to its smoked pork processing operation in Hatfield, PA. The 308,000 s.f. facility sits on a 32-acre plot on the Hatfield campus and increases production efficiency and capacity to 6,000 pounds per hour—good for 100 million pounds of cooked and smoked meat products per year.

In addition to managing the facility’s design and construction, Gray provided extensive process & packaging systems design and engineering for multiple raw and ready-to-eat meat products. Equipment services included specification, bidding, and award for integrated line layouts and MEP systems, followed by procurement and field installation support. Services and support to the customer’s processes covered a wide range of subsystems, including brine making, injection, massaging, stuffing, smoking/cooking, chilling, slicing, cubing, and primary packaging formats.

The new operation’s fully hygienic design separates incoming raw ingredients from finished ready-to-eat products and includes a 4,800-ton ammonia refrigeration system and an isolated viewing corridor for customers of the RTE process lines. A supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system provides unprecedented insight into production, while maintenance service rails, weigh-in motion conveyor, and packaging system keep the facility’s nine product lines functioning effectively at every stage of the process.