X-labelled French vegetable
Vegetables can unite people. Discovering that the Bonduelle Group had operated in the French region of Aquitaine since 1978 was reason enough to start a joint venture under the name of Soléal. A historical association with the aim of maintaining, developing and strengthening the vegetable industry in South West France to better withstand international competition. BMI Axelent was given the task of providing machine safety.
Every year Soléal employs 210 permanent and 650 seasonal workers (June to October) who turn 12,000 hectares (roughly half of the agricultural area) into vegetable plots comprising of maize, beans and green peas. Soléal has production plants in Landes Labenne and Bordères with a total capacity of 165,000 tons of tinned and frozen vegetables.
Safety in focus
All the processed vegetables are marketed by Bonduelle, a world leader in the vegetable industry. Bonduelle strives to create the very best health and safety conditions in the fields and at the production plants, as well as for the end consumer.
The company attaches great importance to safety, which now forms an integral part of its business strategy and an annual safety related investment policy.
The Safety Officer at Bonduelle:
“Our production line with 3 to 1 sterilisation is a very hazardous area. Following a risk analysis we decided it was simply our duty to replace it with a new safer line."
BMI Axelent met all our requirements
“We contacted BMI Axelent, who had previously installed X-Guard at lines 7 and 8 through one of our suppliers. The key thing for us was to bring safety in line with the safe distance norms as laid down in ISO13857, that the mesh was of the right size and we could solve the problem of machine guard height and operator admission to the risk zones.”
Speed is crucial
“Our production lines run 24/7 during the maize and green bean season. When emergencies arise they have to be dealt with very quickly. The X-Guard system facilitates rapid freeing of the panels with an X-Key as the only tool required. For the same reason, all our doors are secured by Axelent X-Lock, which can always be opened but cannot be closed from the inside.
One nice bonus that we ourselves discovered, was that since each panel can be adjusted between its two poles, we could easily adapt the machine guards to suit the sloping floor.”
