Key design criteria for Fieldale Farms’ RTE facility were bio-security and food safety.
E. coli, Listeria and other nasty microbes have made big headlines this past year-and have closed the doors permanently for some processors. While best practices and employee training go a long way in reducing the number of bad bacteria, nothing assures food safety like a new plant that’s designed to eliminate microbes, minimize breeding places for bacteria and is easy to clean.
Fieldale Farms is a regional, integrated poultry processor that processes more than 3 million chickens per week for both private label and institutional customers such as food service and restaurants. The privately held company ranks 14th in size for US poultry producers, employing about 5,000 people in northern Georgia.
Fieldale’s new ready-to-eat (RTE) plant in Gainesville, GA, sparkles with all the features necessary to keep microbes out. Dr. Dan White, Fieldale’s Quality/Food Safety Manager, says that bio-security and food safety were the overriding concerns during project planning. A particular challenge involved minimizing the potential for cross-contamination when both a raw process and a fully-cooked process is being done under the same roof. “The solutions,” says White, “were engineered into the building and involved the design of the air flow; strategies for personnel and product movement; and the types and locations of maintenance areas, walls, separate drainage systems and veneers to emphasize food safety and bio-security.”
Fieldale needed an engineering firm and project/construction management team that could handle its specific challenges. Vaughn, Coltrane, Pharr and Associates (VCP&A) and its sister company, KCV Construction Services Inc., won the project in December of 2004, because, for them, designing and building an RTE plant based on bio-security and food safety were not new concepts. VCP&A designed six RTE plants in the last three years, and KCV had managed three RTE projects in the last five years.