2023-12-28 11:56:00
The Meat for You factory is located in Oupeye, on the banks of the Albert canal. This name probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but it is the factory where all the fresh meat is transported which will be processed to land in all Aldi stores in the country. We were able to visit this company which makes tons of sausages, skewers, cuts of meat and other gourmet platters throughout the year.
A few days before the end-of-year holidays, all production lines were obviously running at full capacity. “This is obviously our busiest time of the year, the last two weeks of December represent a significant part of our annual turnover,” explains Luc van de Vijver, project manager for Meat for You. The barbecue period is also very important, but it spreads over several months, so management is simpler. Here, we receive all the meat – except poultry which is produced on another site – from the slaughterhouses and we process the pieces which will then be sold in Aldi stores.”
We are talking about the range of fresh meat available on the shelves, and not the products sold in Renmans butchers, which have their own supply chain.
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For more than an hour, we were able to visit the 12,000 square meters of the factory where around 190 people currently work, including around forty temporary workers who have come to strengthen the teams for this end-of-year rush. The factory almost never stops running. The night shift starts at 11 p.m., and the day shift takes over at 6 a.m. Around 5 p.m., all the trucks are loaded and head to the Aldi depots, before arriving at the store the next morning.
And during this holiday season, production mainly revolves around two products: gourmet trays for fondues and for pierrades. “Over the seven weeks before and during the holidays, 2.5 million pieces of meat will leave the factory,” comments Aubry Watrin, production manager at Meat for You. We manage to release 600 to 700 trays per hour. For breadcrumbs alone, we have three kinds, a ton of each.”
This factory of course meets all hygiene criteria. We were equipped like cosmonauts during the visit, and each entry to a workshop requires workers and visitors to wash their hands and feet twice.
aldi, meat, factory, holidays, new year, pierrade, end of year, wholesaler, butcher shop ©cameriere ennio
Meat for You works exclusively with Aldi, since the first contract signed in 2017. “We recovered an old slaughterhouse, and we transformed everything to have a state-of-the-art factory,” says Luc van de Vijver. Each production line is made to fit the products ordered by Aldi. The range can often change, not to mention the tests which are carried out by launching a few new products on the shelves. We have to be able to adapt.”
For the holidays everything was in any case ready to meet demand, and it is especially for New Year’s Eve that we expect record sales, from Aldi, the Walloons being rather fans of fondue bourguignonne, the Flemish generally preferring pierrades.
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