Techlink :: Tech Practice :: Food and Bio-related

Searching the supermarket shelves for a ready made dinner? Chances are that you'll be picking a meal developed and produced by Meal Innovations at their factory in Palmerston North.

This small company produces a huge number of meals which are delivered throughout New Zealand. At present there are no residential deliveries, partly due to the inherent problems of big trucks trundling up to houses. This is something the company may consider for the future however, and they are currently looking at using smaller couriers to diversify their customer base. For now refrigerated trucks are used to move the products throughout the North and South Islands.

Kim Uthina: sales department
"Considering we're only small, we pump out a lot of product here – it's a huge production load and the summer is just mad! It's good though, it's a brilliant little company – I've been here four years, and I love it."

Soups, salads, main meals and desserts are produced at Meal Innovation's factory, each developed specifically for a client or a particular meal range. The meals vary from popular ethnic foods, such as butter chicken, to more traditional New Zealand food, for example cottage pie.

Development of a meal begins when a client discusses what they want with production manager Ana Tuimana.

Ana works with a consultant chef and gives him guidelines as to what the client requires. He is expected to come up with two to five recipes to trial, keeping to ingredients which are of good quality and easy to source. Generally there are no cost constraints but the company has a range of costs for cheaper and more expensive meals. Meat meals, such as the Lamb Shanks, are the most expensive.

Lasagne is a long-established Kiwi favourite and a popular Meal Innovations product. The lasagne meal was developed when the client required something that would appeal to a large proportion of customers, and asked the chef to develop a selection of meals which could be easily and successfully reheated at home.

In this case the chef worked on a number of recipes, including the lasagne, which he then gave to Ana, who makes any changes in consultation with him. Each trial recipe is cooked and evaluated on site. There is a lot of back-and-forth as the recipe is retested and Ana considers "What's missing from this?" This is a long process and taste is only one factor. The chef must also consider labour and whether 100 portions of the recipe could be made in half an hour, whether ingredients could be weighed out beforehand or not and whether it can fit into current factory procedure.

At this stage Allan Johnson, of the marketing team, is brought in to look at the costing. He will decide if the meal will be worth producing in terms of the expected profit margin, and whether it will enable Meal Innovations to offer a competitive price. He considers if the recipe is feasible at that time of year, depending upon seasonal food costs or ease of obtaining ingredients. Sometimes recipes are returned to the chef so that alternative, cheaper ingredients which will give the same taste can be incorporated.

After this in-house quality testing, meal samples are sent to AgriQuality whose testing will determine whether the meal will be sold. Four food safety tests are carried out; these check for the presence of listeriosis, salmonella and e-coli and do an aerobic plate count (which counts the live bacteria in a sample). Storage tests are also done according to Ana's requirements. She will ask them to do tests on a certain day; if the food was cooked on Day 1 she might order a test for Day 5, 7 or 10. The results of these tests determine the shelf life of the product. Ana and her supervisors will then consider whether the shelf life is feasible or realistic, (supermarkets will not sell a product if the shelf life is less than five days), and whether or not to go ahead with production. The salads have a shelf life of seven days and the ready meals ten days.

At the end of testing the product is sent to the customer for approval. They might pick two from the five samples supplied and might ask for changes to be made, for example more or less salt. Two lasagne meals, pumpkin and feta plus al forno (beef), were selected by the client as meals giving a 'home made' flavour.

The lasagne meals proved so popular that Meal Innovations decided to add more to the selection. They kept the same base and looked at what could be added or changed for a new meal. In doing this they looked at what they were already producing and how it could be adapted. They were already making a chicken and vegetable meal so were able to use this mixture to make a smoked chicken lasagne. A spinach and cheese mixture used in cannelloni was perfect for spinach and cheese lasagne.

A further two lasagne meals – Sicilian and seafood were added to the menu further down the track.

A lot of meals are developed and produced for sale in supermarkets. These vary, even between supermarkets owned by the same company, as each has a particular image it wants to reinforce. The supermarket does the marketing while Meal Innovations does the production. The company has a cost range customers select from; some of the meals are cheap but provide good value for money.

Some of the supermarkets sell individual ready-meals while others, aiming for the family market, sell large size portions. This variety provides Meal Innovations with a multiple product pathway.

The company also develops and produces bulk meals, designed for catering companies in institutions.

Although different customers might request the same meal, such as fish pie, it doesn't mean that the same recipe is used. Each customer has a unique recipe which incorporates minor changes in the recipe depending upon the potential market. A fish pie designed to be served to young university students might have different ingredients or proportions to the same meal served in a retirement home.

One of the latest, particularly challenging, innovations has been development of meals for Metabolize, which sells meals especially made for particular health requirements. Meal Innovations had been approached by a fitness instructor at Les Mills Gym, requesting 15 meals low in fat and sugar, with a high protein content, to suit their members following a fitness regime. After discussions about requirements, such as the amounts of carbohydrates and proteins, the work was passed on to the chef who came up with the recipes.

This was a long process and the end product differed from the original recipe because, after making and testing it, the carbohydrate, protein and sugar levels had to be changed. Strict guidelines meant Ana had to ensure the chef balanced nutritional contents and food safety regulations with a taste they would be able to sell – "there was no point making something that tasted like cardboard".

Meal Innovations is now selling low fat salads to suit the growing health-conscious market in New Zealand. The chef is coming up with new recipes to attract this type of customer.

A new division, selling through online menus, started in late 2005. Sales and Marketing Manager Allan Johnson travels around the country promoting Meal Innovations products. After chatting with various people he decided that motel catering could be a new market and the company looked into this. The result was DINZ (Dining in New Zealand) meals. These include soups, salads, mains and desserts but also offer 'serve over' meal components. These are bags of food which the customer can put together to make a meal. There are base meals, such as macaroni and savoury potato, curries, sauces, gravies, cooked rice and pasta.

Once Ana has finished with all the technical details of a recipe it is passed to Kim Uthinain the sales department. She programmes each recipe into the computer system, labelled with the recipient's name to allow for the small changes made for a particular client.

The office systems are highly computerised. Meal orders are faxed or emailed to the Meals Innovation office where the order, making and delivery dates are entered on the computer. The order then goes through the computer system which picks up the recipe and prints out paperwork for the preparation, kitchen, production line and dispatch teams so that all know what to do, when to do it and when it will leave the premises.

The staff in each area is trained to know what they should be expecting to do on a daily basis. For example, the team preparing vegetables knows they should be handling ingredients for Salads, Meals to go, Meals for Catering and Metabolized on a daily basis. If they don't receive the details on one of these they are expected to check to ensure a mistake hasn't been made.

There is only one factory shift but two shifts per day in the kitchen. The kitchen team will receive a print out with the quantities of the ingredients for the recipe they're making but their own folder has the preparation details.

The time schedule must be adhered to, with only orders received before 11.00 being processed that day, so that the truck arriving at 3:30 can be packed and away. The planning system is a crucial part of the whole operation; it is Ana's responsibility to set cut-off times that suit the nature of the meal – preparation and cooking, cooling, cutting, portioning out and dispatch cycle. Customers need to be informed of the cut-off times and everything being put on the truck that day has to be cut off by 10:00. If a truck has to wait for some reason Ana goes back to find out why and whether some part of the established procedure should be changed.

Ana says that they work as one team, although they operate in different departments, and that there is a need for open communication – "If the truck leaves without product everyone loses". If deadlines are squeezed a department needs to request assistance so that help from other departments can be pulled in.

Techlink is sad to note that Meal Innovations ceased operation in February 2008. The loss of this company is a loss to New Zealand education, as reflected in the following article from the February 2008 issue of t-news.

On 25 January 2008, 30 staff at the Meal Innovations factory in Palmerston North were given three weeks' notice. Just another New Zealand manufacturing casualty you might think – but this one was a bit closer to home and hit a bit harder.

Meal Innovations is a Palmerston North based food-processing company which was set up in 1998, following the demise of Hester Guy Foods earlier that year. The factory supplied ready-made packaged food and salads to supermarkets.

Meal Innovations' production and distribution practice was featured in a Techlink 'Enterprise Links' case study for which the management were very generous with their time. The response to the case study has been extremely positive and it is obviously proving useful to many teachers and groups of students. Meal Innovations also hosted a number of visits to the production facility by groups of teachers and students.

Unfortunately, it appears that the loss of one large customer proved critical to the viability of the Meal Innovations operation and it is this that will force its closure this month.

There is a strong message here for technology teachers and technology educators as we work to link classroom practice with the range and diversity of Technological Practice in the community: the high level of goodwill towards teachers and students within their local community of such businesses should never be taken for granted or the input they can provide undervalued. When we link with the community, take time to celebrate the success achieved and acknowledge the significance of the time commitment it inevitably involves on the part of the enterprises.

We thank management and staff at Meal Innovations for their willingness to share their expertise, and wish them every success in their future employment.

The following questions were put to Ana Tuimana, Production Manager at Meal Innovations, in late 2007 by Susan Corbett, of Victoria University of Wellington, as part of her study, Intellectual property in Technology teaching, identifying intellectual property implications and issues that emerge from selected Techlink case studies. Their replies take the form of edited reported speech.