C.Vale has opened the largest and most modern fish processing facility in Brazil, supplied with Marel processing equipment and systems.
The opening of the C.Vale plant last month was attended by thousands of people and underscores the importance of agribusiness for the Brazilian economy. The cooperative was also commemorating 20 years of operating its agro industrial complex.
The President of the Republic Michel Temer, the Governor of the state of Parana Beto Richa, and the Minister of Agriculture Blairo Borges Maggi were present at the event, along with other authorities in the sector.
The new factory is just over 10,000 squar emetres and has an initial processing capacity of 75,000 tilapia per day. It is located in C.Vale’s industrial park in Palotina, western Parana, where the co-operative also has a poultry facility that currently processes 540,000 chickens per day.
According to C.Vale’s president Alfredo Lang, the plant will be the largest in Brazil and the most modern in Latin America.
‘Once we’re processing 75,000 tilapia per day, our next goal will be to reach 300,000 per day. We have a consolidated customer base who are waiting for our fish products both in the domestic and foreign market,’ he said.
The long-time partnership between Marel and C.Vale, mainly in the areas of poultry and further processing, was influential in the development of this new project.
‘In Brazil, C.Vale and Marel have a shared history going back more than two decades. C.Vale was one of the first co-operatives to install a Nuova evisceration line from Marel and they continue to rely on Marel solutions for their business,’ said Marel general manager in Brazil Francisco Leandro, who was also present at the inauguration ceremony. ‘This new project is not just a watershed in the fish industry in Brazil, it also reiterates and strengthens the partnership between the companies.’
From the start, it was important to C.Vale that the processing facility would allow for future development and expansion. In addition to the new processing technologies, the project employs a new intensive fish farming model and the future gains in production scale are expected to be extraordinary.
‘Working in partnership with Marel, we looked for the best alternatives: number of employees and stations, lines and operations flow,’ recalled Andre Luis Bertoldo, project and maintenance engineer at C.Vale. ‘So together we formed a proposal that meets the current needs and also allows for an expansion of the productive capacity over the coming years.’
