Storage of meat products from El Encinar de Humienta

About El Encinar de Humienta

Founded in 1998, El Encinar de Humienta is the number one company in beef production in Spain. The company's headquarters are in the Central Meat Market (Madrid), although its 12,000 m² production plant is 200 km away, specifically in the municipality of Almaraz (western Spain).

The production centre has the most cutting-edge technology to run its business according to the strictest certifications. About 70% of its production volume is sold in Spain and the rest is exported mainly to Europe (Germany, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands), Africa and Asia.

New freezer stores

Since its beginnings, El Encinar de Humienta has been committed to selling high-quality meats at a competitive price through an efficient, on-time service that satisfies its clientele. To this end, the company continues to be firmly committed to R&D and has boosted the inclusion of new technologies in all its processes, including logistics.

“To improve our supply chain, we needed to increase our facility's storage capacity. Previously, we used to freeze and store finished products in other facilities,” explains Jaime Yartu, Managing Director at El Encinar de Humienta. However, this solution made it difficult to manage the goods and entailed an added logistics cost.

To deal with this situation, the company has set up a new freezer installation (working at -25 ºC), next to its production centre in Almaraz. It is allocated to finished products, ready to be distributed to their customers in Spain and abroad.

Over a 1,000 m²surface area, the chamber consists of two 9-metre high, compact pallet racking blocks with the semi-automatic Pallet Shuttle system. “We chose this solution because it provides us with the maximum possible storage capacity,” emphasises Yartu. The racks are deep enough to hold between 8 and 9 pallets in each channel, bringing the total storage capacity to 1,997 pallets.

The compaction systems are especially suitable for frozen storage installations –such as El Encinar de Humienta’s– as they mean significant power savings for generating cold, since this cold is distributed around a larger number of stored pallets.

Furthermore, among compact systems, the Pallet Shuttle is the one that speeds up the entry and exit of goods. This chamber receives about 70 pallets a day and distributes another 70 pallets. The installation has two motorised shuttles that run inside the storage channels inserting or removing the pallets from their corresponding locations.