Cherkizovo Group, Russia’s largest meat producer, is honored to have won the Russian Investor of the Year award bestowed by the Moscow Region Governor as part of the Strong Moscow Region 2019 Awards.
The award was presented personally by Andrey Vorobyev, Governor of the Moscow Region, who praised the regional government’s standing tradition of commending the region’s investor community and greeting its newcomers over the Russian Pancake week (Maslenitsa).
In summer 2018, Cherkizovo Group launched a new meat processing plant in the Moscow Region’s Kashira District. Cherkizovo Kashira is the first fully automated smoked sausage plant in Russia, unrivalled by the European peers. At full capacity, the plant will produce up to 30,000 tonnes of finished products per year and will serve up to 30% of the domestic demand. The Company’s investment in the project totalled RUB 7 billion.
The project’s goal was to minimize human contact with raw materials during processing (with the only exception of organoleptic quality assurance that for now is not covered by automation) while also preventing any changes to the process flow.
The key target was to ensure compliance with stringent biosecurity standards, including thorough control over the quality of feedstock, both produced internally and sourced from third-party suppliers. The newly implemented RFID systems allow the Company to keep track of each and every stock unit, tracing the feedstock type, mass and temperature requirements. Using robots has enabled a more precise control over production processes, rooting out pretty much any possibility of substandard output.
“Our facility has no equals among Russian, European and probably global meat producers,” said Anastasia Mikhailova, Head of Communications at Cherkizovo Group. “Its level of automation is unrivalled in our industry and is only matched by a few projects in other sectors. This is the future, and not just for the meat processing industry, but for the tech and industrial sectors overall. We would like to thank the Moscow Region Government and Andrey Vorobyev personally for their support and encouragement in the delivery of this ground-breaking project.”
The Group does not intend to stay put, as its development programme through 2024 envisions an entire meat processing cluster around this site outfitted to produce other types of products.
