Sunnybrand has recently upgraded its production plant, hatchery and breeder farm, to the latest technology available, in fact the processing plant has new, unique equipment, and is the only plant in Australia at this time with such equipment. This equipment includes a new automatic live bird handling system called Easyload, an automatic evisceration machine, a processed bird cooling system called air chilling and a new weighing and transfer system called Chickway.

This modern equipment replaces a manual live bird handling system, a manual evisceration machine which had four employees to operate. The cooling system used was two chilled water spin chillers and all the chickens were weighed by an out dated, slow computerised system.

No research and development is conducted at this plant, we are customer and market driven.

Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance is a very big part of our operation, we have a QA manager and an assistant, who continually carry out checks on temperature, procedures,
quality of product at all critical control points throughout the processing procedure.
Monitoring sheets are filled out on a regular basis during production and these results are scrutinised by management on a daily basis. Any breech of our QA procedures is
quickly brought to the attention of the QA manager or supervisors and necessary corrective procedures put into place to correct the non conformity.

A market driven company
We are a market driven company, who provides what our customers require. If another chicken company produces a new line, we will develop that same line to offer to our customers.

Sunnybrand are continually monitored by the EPA and has to follow strict guide lines laid down by them on the disposal of all waste product, including water. We sell all our solid waste to a rendering plant (A.J. Bush Pty Ltd) which turn the feathers into feather meal, the bones and meat scrap and offal are turned into poultry offal meal which we purchase back from them as a high protein feed supplement. The blood is collected separately and sent to Casino meat works and made into blood and bone meal, for use on your gardens.

The waste water is treated on site by a modern filtration plant. The water first passes over a machine called a Bow strainer, which removes all solids, which is sent to the rendering plant. The water that remains then passes through a clarifier where all the sediment settles to the bottom and all the fats rise to the top. The fat is skimmed off hourly, stored and sent to the rendering plant. All the sediment is extracted, stored and a farmer purchases this product as a fertiliser for his farm.

The water then passes into an anaerobic pond (which in our case is a series of green tanks as we are not allowed to build an uncovered pond). From there is passes through an aerobic pond, which is an open pond. From there it leeches out into the surrounding tree and grassed areas.

There are plenty of career opportunities with in the establishment. To give just a few
examples of this, a person who started here as a junior labourer is now one of our best boners taking home an excellent pay packet each week.

Another person who started off working in the evisceration room, gutting chickens, is now an assistant factory manager, and is currently acting as the production manager.

All workers, both male and female, are treated equally in conditions and pay. Special
allowances are made for pregnant employees, and employees who have special needs.

Product is packed either as bulk packs, single packs fresh or single pack frozen.
A lot of product is packaged as single tray pack.

For more information on The Chicken Industry go to The Australian Chickens Meat Federation

www.chicken.org.au