The Veal Appeal

Lean, tender, flavourful and nutritious, veal has a lot going for it as a healthy red-meat dining option for North American consumers—except the all-important mainstream popularity and dinner table prominence accorded to beef, pork, chicken and other more conventional sources of animal protein.

But thanks to tireless efforts by companies like the Laval, Que.-based Montpak International, there is no reason to think that this relative market obscurity is destined to be entrenched as a permanent fait accompli forever.

Established in 1959 in Montreal, Montpak patiently built up its reputation over the years as a family-owned, quality-driven processor of a diverse range of veal products ranging from meatballs and scallopini to roasts, chops, shanks, cubes and ground veal.

Owned by the Fontaine family since 1989, in 2006 Montpak merged with Bellivo Transformation, another family owned veal processor, to form Montpak International, which has since grown into a leading veal and lamb processor in North America.

Operating one of the largest federally inspected, HACCP-accredited slaughter facilities for veal and lamb on the continent, as well as a federally inspected, HACCP-certified 80,000-square-foot processing plant in Laval boasting the international SQF (Safe Quality Food) Level 2 certification, the company’s knack for developing innovative and varied ready-to-cook products has been aptly rewarded with a growing customer base and genuine respect in the North American meat industry circles.

Employing about 150 people working on a one-shift schedule through most of the year, the so-called ‘Transformation’ plant in Laval houses six production lines to process and package nearly 100 different SKUs (stock-keeping units) of high-quality veal, lamb and beef products customers in the grocery retail, food-service and further-processing markets across Canada.

“By respecting the highest standards in quality and food safety, our products have gained a world-renowned reputation,” says Montpak’s engineering product manager Ballo Kounadi.

“We are proud to provide food retailers, food-service distributors and further processors a full range of quality milk-fed and grain-fed veal, as well as lamb products,” he says.

“Given the demanding nature of our clientele, we also offer Kosher and Halal products to specific markets,” Kounadi adds, noting that the company’s vertically integrated structure, as part of the Préval AG agri-food group, ensures full product traceability and quality assurance from the slaughterhouse through to processing and distribution.

With veal products accounting for about a half of the plant’s production output—including both milk-fed and grain-fed calves—the company’s hard-earned reputation as a reliable, flexible and innovative meat processor has also opened up some lucrative international markets in recent years, including Japan and Dubai.

In addition, Montpak has also launched an online store for direct-to-consumer sales, becoming one of very few large Canadian meat processors to enter the burgeoning e-commerce marketplace.

To meet the growing demand for its products, the company’s Laval facility—started up in 2010—has seen a significant influx of automated processing and packaging equipment onto the plant floor in recent years, including palletizing robots, mobile scales and automated strapping machinery.

“Our secondary packaging operations have been significantly automated,” Kounadi relates, “but our engineering team is always on a mission to automate more of our processes, including primary packaging.”

As part of that endeavor, Montpak has recently invested into a leading-edge, fully-automatic weighing and labeling system manufactured by renowned German slicing, weighing and labeling technologies expert Bizerba SE & Co. KG, and distributed in Canada through its Bizerba Canada Inc. subsidiary, based in Mississauga, Ont.

Featuring ground-breaking linerless labeling technology, the CleanCut Linerless Solution represents a giant technological leap in retail labeling technology because it uses specialty-converted label rolls without any liner— the paper or film backing that protects the adhesive on the label until it is ready to be applied by the label applicator.

With this thicker backing layer removed from the roll structure, CleanCut Linerless Label users are able to get up to 40 per cent more labels per roll, according to Bizerba, while generating no waste from the process—with no leftover backing materials to send to landfill.

This combination of less roll changes and the cumulative benefit of the elimination of labeling material waste from the process proved to be irresistible for a progressive company like Montpak, for whom environmental sustainability is a core corporate priority, alongside animal welfare.

“Montpak International’s ecological footprint is in line with environmental best practices,” says Kounadi, citing continuous company-wide efforts to:

• Reduce greenhouse effect gases;
• Use eco-friendly packaging;
• Recycle systematically;
• Recover and manage waste;
• Reduce energy consumption.

With such mindset, selecting a technology that would not only replace a much slower manual process, but deliver instant waste reduction was virtually a no-brainer for Montpak, who commissioned its latest automation investment at the Laval plant in June of this year.

As Kounadi recalls, “We got some quotations from other equipment manufacturers other than Bizerba, but ultimately the Bizerba solution was the best option for us.

“Their CleanCut Linerless Label Applicator machine can weigh and apply labels with all the product information we need, and its automatic set-up allows us to set up a recipe for each tray size,” says Kounadi, complimenting Bizerba for the high-quality linerless label rolls it supplies to the plant.

Once those rolls are loaded onto the CleanCut Linerless Label Applicator, the machine kicks into high gear to apply full-wrap and/or C-wrap labels on to the passing tray packages conveyed from the system’s weighing station.

As soon as that weight is determined, it is is used to generate all the associated product information for that package to be added to the pre-printed linerless label attached onto the tray, typically as a narrow band or ribbon tightly overwrapped around the tray’s curvatures along the middle of the tray—much like a more commonplace paperboard sleeve but at a fraction of material size and weight.

While the CleanCut system is capable of performing this task at speeds up to 100 trays per minute, depending on tray size, the Laval plant runs it at 28 trays per minute to match the speed of the Reiser ROSS model IN850 tray sealer packaging the final product inside the plastic trays.

While linerless labeling technology is still widely considered to be in its infancy, the introduction of the CleanCut Linerless Solution into the market is clearly positioning Bizerba as an early industry leader in this game-changing technology.

According to Bizerba, the technology is supplied a complete solution consisting of labels, hardware, software, service and support from a single source in a powerful, high-performance package delivering instant improvements in productivity, efficiency and sustainability by:

• Considerably lowering effort: Significantly less blade cleaning due to CleanCut’s adhesive-free area on the label where the blade makes the cut;
• Fewer roll changes: Up to 40 per cent more labels per roll compared to labels with liner;
• Saving storage space: Less rolls in stock because CleanCut Linerless label rolls have more labels;
• Using entire rolls to the core: Even adhesion application;
• Minimal setup times for product/package changes through automated adjustment;
• High-quality product presentation on the store-shelf, even if the label carries a lot of information;
• Avoiding waste: No liner, no punching residues, rolls used up to the core.

Aptly called BRAIN2, Bizerba’s powerful software system helps users turn their production steps into an intelligently networked business process with one software to digitize all management and device tasks to provide:

• Qualified data pool in real time as a decision-making tool;
• Centrally-controlled management, documentation and analysis of all processes;
• Full transparency and dynamics of a fully automatic production process;
• Simple integration with customers’ ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems.
• Compatibility with third-party hardware or software enabled by the software’s open architecture.

According to Kounadi, the installation of the system was expertly handled by Bizerba highly professional technicians who had the machine up-and-running within three days of its arrival.

In addition, they also providing comprehensive staff training for using the BRAIN2 software and other operating essentials to ensure a highly successful system startup.

“This machine has been working very well for us since we bought it a few months ago,” says Montpak president and chief executive officer Alex Fontaine, one of three Fontaine bothers working in various senior management roles at the company.

“We’ve been working with Bizerba for 15 years,” says Fontaine, “and they have always delivered high-quality solutions.

“We recently bought a very efficient scale system from them that works very well with our trays,” he relates, “and this new linerless labeling system has provided more automation for our line by applying linerless sleeves automatically.”

As a result, the Laval plant was able to free up six plant employees who previously did the tray labeling manually by hand for other more meaningful jobs within the facility.

As Fontaine remarks, “Like many companies, we have our own labor shortage challenges, so removing labor from a manual process into more value-added tasks has become a priority.

“Being able to apply the sleeve automatically is a great tool for freeing up people and simplifying the process,” Fontaine states, “and using less packaging material, while providing all the required product information with liner-less labels, is totally in line with our ambitious environmental goals and objectives.”

Such endorsement is a priceless feedback for Bizerba Canada’s industrial sales director Derek Wagget, who played an instrumental role in the CleanCut system installation at Laval.

As Wagget notes, “There are a lot of very exciting things going on in packaging right now in regard to reducing landfill waste, and linerless labels are a perfect example of that.

“Whereas conventional labels come with Silicone-coated paper backing that cannot be recycled, all that liner really has nowhere to go but landfill at the end of the day,” Wagget explains.

“So if you look at all these plants running labels all day long, they produce thousands of miles of non-recyclable Silicone liner that can only go to landfill,” says Wagget, asserting that linerless labeling is bound to revolutionize the entire labeling industry in the not-so-far future.

“The technology has now been around for four or five years in Canada,” Wagget relates, “but it sometimes takes a long time for people to change their mindsets about how labels should be put on the pack.”

With the Bizerba CleanCut system being introduced into the North American market in 2019, the global COVID-19 pandemic also had a major adverse impact on the technology’s marketability for a couple of years, he points out.

According to Wagget, Montpak approached Bizerba about the CleanCut system after hearing about an Ontario-based seafood processor that had already purchased one from Bizerba Canada earlier for its operations.

“Ballo Kounadi actually flew into Toronto and asked me to take him to that customer to see the system in action,” Wagget recalls.

“After he got back to Laval, he had a good conversation with Alex Fontaine, and they decided to move ahead with it.

“They certainly liked the sustainability part of the technology,” Wagget says, “but they also wanted to have a nice attractive label that did not cover up the product in the tray too much, looked good, and contained all the required information on one single label with minimal environmental footprint.”

As Wagget relates, the actual rolls of linerless labels for CleanCut system’s operation are made and printed at the Bizerba Tekno Label Inc. (BTL) plant in Boucherville, Que., which supplies labels for all of Montpak’s flagship Fontaine Family range of high-end retail veal products packaged using MAP (modified atmosphere packaging) and thermoform skin-packing processes.

Boasting a fairly diverse product portfolio, the Fontaine Family products—originally launched about 10 years ago—are packaged in distinct, 100 per cent recyclable purple meat trays that effectively stand out in retail meat cases to break through the wall of white and/or black trays typically dominating the meat counters.

As Fontaine notes, “With veal being such a niche product, we really needed to have a distinct look to make it easy for the shoppers to find it.

“Choosing purple trays was a big decision for us,” says Fontaine, adding the striking, eye-catching color was selected as part of a major packaging design overhaul for the brand a couple of years ago in partnership with the Montreal office of the Pigeon Branding packaging-design agency.

As part of the new look, it was important that the product labeling would have a minimal physical footprint to provide full product transparency through the clear film topping the in-tray product, while also providing all the required product information generated at the weighing station.

As such, the CleanCut Linerless Solution effectively addresses both of these requirements with unerring precision and minimal environment impact.

“We hear a lot of people talk about our purple trays in the meat cases of their grocery stores,” says Fontaine, “and it’s all been very positive.

“For anyone shopping for veal or lamb, they know exactly what to look for to quickly find it in the meat case.”

Although Fontaine says he was initially hesitant about using family surname as the actual brand name, doing so also proved to be a brilliant marketing masterstroke.

“It really gives consumer a sense of confidence when they see a family literally standing up behind their product,” he states.

“This is really important for a family business like ours because it demonstrates just how passionate we are about our products,” he adds.

“Everything we do at Montpak at every step of our farm-to-fork process is done with passion: from humane treatment of animals at the farm level to reducing our environmental impact through our in-house sustainability programs and innovative new technologies like Bizerba’s CleanCut solution,” Fontaine sums up.

“We are a passionate family that employs a team of people who also share our strong passion for what we do,” he concludes, “and we’re working all the time to share that passion with consumers by offering delicious innovative products in attractive, high-quality and sustainable packaging.”