Wrights Pies Helix Freezer for pies and ready meals

 

Wrights is one of the UK’s leading bakeries and foodservice suppliers.  The company has a constantly expanding portfolio of frozen unbaked and baked products, including ready meals, party food, snacks, cakes, thaw and serve desserts and traditional pasties and pies.

 

Its £20million bakery complex in Crewe, East Cheshire, is capable of producing over five million frozen savoury products every week.  A family business since 1926, Wrights blends traditional cooking methods with the latest manufacturing technology.

 

Wrights was looking to upgrade from static blast freezing on a baked savoury pie line, to a fully automated in-line freezing system.  In addition, the company wanted to link the freezing system to a brand new line of uncooked ready meals from a separate production area.

 

Starfrost designed a Helix Spiral Freezer for Wrights with a processing capacity of 1,500 kg/hr.   The Helix features a 30inch wide conveyor belt with 24.5 tiers spiralling upward around a single rotating drum, giving an effective belt length of 375metres.

 

A dual in-feed conveyor belt design allows both ready meals and pies to be processed simultaneously, with separate control panels for each product line.

 

Ian Hopwood, Engineering Manager, Wrights “Starfrost offered a competitively priced spiral freezer, combining energy efficient operation with long run times and a hygienic low maintenance design.  Starfrost built the freezing system to meet our exact specifications, enabling us not only to expand pie production, but also to launch a new line of ready meal solutions.”