#1/2009
Text: Alexander Farnsworth
By building capacity from the beginning with the best available technology, ready-made food manufacturer Totalmat is aiming to become a major player in Sweden. Two hightech packaging lines help the company meet high sanitary standards.
Totalmat (Total Food) has hit the ground running. The Swedish startup, based in Alingsås, near Gothenburg, is poised to produce 1,000 tons of ready-made food in 2009 for private label customers, restaurants, schools and hospitals. The company, with 21 employees, only started producing food in August 2008, and already it has goals of becoming a major player in Sweden. The trick: Build capacity from the beginning with the best available technology.
Two factors helped get the company off to a strong start. Arla, the Swedish/Danish dairy conglomerate was downsizing in Alingsås, thus liberating 12,000 square metres of industrial space. At the same time the new EU Hazardous Critical Control Points (HACCP) laws took effect for industrial kitchens, forcing school, hospital and retired community kitchens to modernise their equipment.
“The alternative to expensive kitchen renovations is to buy from us,” says Fredrik Järås, managing director of Totalmat, who owns the company together with industrialist J Christer Ericsson of the JCE Group, a conglomerate active within the oil, gas, forestry, fi nancial, real estate and, now, packaged food sectors. “This is a 40 percent-a-year growth sector in Sweden.”
Although the public food supply sector takes a long time to negotiate contracts, Totalmat secured a vital contract with Coop, one of Sweden’s leading supermarket chains, to private label manufacture its range of everyday meals (Vardagsrätter) in March 2008.
With the financial backing of the JCE Group AB, Totalmat has remodelled the Arla facilities in Alingsås to suit its exact needs. The renovation includes two new packaging lines. The first is a sous vide line in which foods such as meat and sauces are first put into vacuum bags and cooked slowly over a long time to preserve nutrients. They are then quickly chilled.
The second line, developed together with AGA, uses modified atmosphere packaging (MAPAX), a method that replaces oxygen in the individual packages with a nitrogen and carbon dioxide mix. This allows the stew – beef or fish – and condiments to stay fresh for up to 16 days. Batch optimisation is achieved through a smart and specially designed trolley/cabinet system where the food gets pushed through from a heated state into a cryogenic cabinet where cooling is achieved in 20 to 40 minutes. This offers higher productivity and longer lasting food.
“It is a new world,” says Järås. “Keeping food fresh and chilled in this way is an ability that not many companies have. And AGA is a leader in this field.”