NHP News Room Spring 2019 News Room FINAL | Page 6

CASE STUDY
COOL SOLUTION FOR
A HOT MARKET
A
ustralia has one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the

world and it’s not unusual to hear people describe their furry
family member’s diet as better than their own.
Balancing their busy lifestyles with the desire to provide nutritious and
delicious meals for their pets, prepared pet foods are an increasingly
popular choice with the domestic and export industry, which is valued
at approximately 1.6 billion dollars.
Cool Off is the pet food raw material manufacturing division of
Staughton Group, which is an Australian, family owned company with
manufacturing facilities in Walget, New South Wales, St George in
Queensland and with the head office and main manufacturing plant
located in Howlong in southern New South Wales.
Staughton Group oversees the manufacture of bulk raw materials
for the pet food industry as well as retail pet foods and supplements
for domestic and export sales. Staughton Group also sources and
processes wild game proteins through its recently acquired Wild Game
Resources Australia.
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Offering unique access to Australian raw materials for pet food
manufacturing, Cool Off delivers high quality products including:
lamb, mechanically de-boned meat, plate frozen offals, boutique meat
meals and natural dried treats – sourcing its red meat offal raw
material from over 30 abattoirs across Australia, processing over 150
tonnes of raw material per day.
To meet the growing demand of the Australian and export pet food
market, Cool Off developed an innovative new collection and chilling
technology to help meet this increasing consumer demand.
Once the offal is processed, it is pumped into large plate freezers, with
the capacity to hold 2,000kg of product, and frozen at -20 degrees
Celsius. The product is then unloaded and palletised for delivery to pet
food manufacturers.
To support this process, Cool Off worked with NHP Electrical
Engineering Products (NHP) and VK Logic to design a system with
an automated plate freezing apparatus that utilises the existing
infrastructure to release each block one by one down the plate onto a