You visited our company Ratimir’s corporate web page. Here, on our web page, you will find the answers to all your questions how and from what sausage and other Ratimir products are made. And if you are ready to hear, and most importantly, see how the company works, then we suggest you to take a real tour of our plant.
The Ratimir holding employs more than 2,600 people, and 1,240 at the main plant.
Ratimir daily provides all employees engaged in the production process with clean sanitary clothing. To do this, we have a laundry at the plant to wash and iron the uniform. Strict sanitary and hygienic requirements apply at the plant. Each employee begins his/her working day with a clean set of uniform to change near personal lockers after shower.
Ratimir plant provides all employees with free meals. Production workers have meals three times per shift. The menu is varied, with an energy value of at least 1,300 kcal per lunch.
Aprons and boots are treated with detergent and disinfectant solutions using special automatic machines. The Ratimir plant is certified according to the ISO 22000 food quality and safety system. The color of the collar indicates which shop the employee is working in.
At the plant, production sites are divided into clean zone, conditionally clean zone, technical zone and the flows of employees to shops were divided. Employees are not permitted to enter other shops. Cameras can quickly monitor if a violation has occurred. So, hands washed, overalls put on.
Since the workers of the shop work with the cutting tools - knives, the shop has high requirements for safety measures. Each employee is protected by metal mail and metal gloves.
Since 2015, Ratimir has taken a course on import substitution and has almost completely switched to Russian pork. Pork comes from Primorsky Region, Western Siberia and Buryatia. Chilled pork comes to the plant from owned livestock unit.
The production laboratory checks all incoming raw stock – meat, spices and auxiliary stock for quality and safety in the food industry. The laboratory also checks finished products. And only after that they are released for sale. Stuffed pancakes, hand-made and machine-made dumplings, vegetable dumplings, steaks, burgers, kebabs, sausages, grill, meatballs and chilled meat are made here. The shop is equipped with advanced European equipment.
To ensure safety requirements, headphones are needed for those working is in an increased noise area.
Meat dumplings are made by special equipment brought from Europe. A distinctive feature of the dumplings made by this machine is a large amount of stuffing in relation to the dough and thin dough. Hourly capacity of this machine is 250 -350 kg.
Due to shock freezing at a temperature below 35 degrees, the frozen substances that are most needed by the human body, including vitamins, micro and macronutrients contained in meat for a long period of 90 days, are maximally saved. Then we go to the sausage shop – the largest shop by the number of employees, range and volume of products.
This shop produces more than 200 types of foodstuffs – sausages, wieners, sausage products, ham.
To reduce the temperature of the stuffing during the emulsion formation, ice is added to the bowl of the cutter. Another important ingredient is a set of spices and herbs, which for each sausage is individual, carefully selected to give the original taste of each product. Within an hour, the cutter makes 1,400 kg of minced meat for semi-smoked sausages.
So, we came to the sausage forming area. Ready mince is stuffed into a natural shell manually, and into artificial – automatically.
Smoking of sausages and delicacies occurs using natural wood chips from Krasnodar beech wood, which was sought for a long time and chosen due to a specific aroma and minimum content of tar.
Chips are poured into a smoke generator, where according to the method of incomplete combustion the wood is smoldering and natural smoke is emitted. The process of cooking goes on with the hot steam.
Products brought to culinary readiness are immediately sent to the location. For these purposes, the rapid cooling chamber is used, where rapid cooling occurs according to a few programs by means of air-droplet circulation and cold supply. The products are placed in aftercooling chambers, where they are cooled to a temperature not higher than 6 degrees.
Upon reaching this temperature, the quality management service checks each frame of the ready products for compliance with the product temperature and quality indicators, according to the regulatory documentation. That is, they conduct organoleptic evaluation of products – checking the appearance, taste, color, smell, sectional view and texture.
In such packing, Ratimir guarantees the quality and safety of the product to the customer’s kitchen.
And, finally, a gravitational robotic warehouse is the only one among the food enterprises in the Far East. The main purpose of this warehouse is the smart rotation system.
First, the products that earlier arrived at the warehouse are shipped. The basic range is updated every two days, the operator inputs the barcode in software and the boxes move along the conveyor. Then, the robotic arm reads the barcode. According to this barcode, it puts the boxes in particular cells as ordered by the software.
Later, the operator sends a signal to the robot-manipulator, which removes the necessary box and delivers it to the packing table for transportation to the stores.
Every day, during tea breaks, employees eat sandwiches with sausages they made with their own hands. For breaks there is a recreation room with comfortable chairs and a tennis table.
Employees are delivered to work by corporate vehicles. Before entering the production building, one must pass through the sanitary inspection room.
With the help of a disinfecting non-alcoholic solution, a thorough treatment of the hands occurs to kill all microbes.
At the entrance to each production shop there is a sanitary hygiene room.
Sausage begins, of course, with meat. Welcome to the Deboning shop. Thanks to the new automated deboning facility, the productivity of half carcass cutting has increased compared to manual cutting by 20%.
The productivity of this line for cutting half carcass is 3-3.5 tons per hour. In one hour, one boner processes 150 kg of meat. Boner is one of the most difficult and physically demanding professions at the plant. Unprepared persons hardly can perform such work. The cut raw meat is fed to the Sausage, Smoked products and Ready-to-cook products shops.
Within 3 hours, chilled pork is delivered from Spassk District by specialized vehicles, in which special temperature conditions are observed.
Next we will visit Ratimir’s production laboratory, a unique one in the Far East among the meat processing enterprises, equipped with modern express analyzers. It conducts organoleptic, physico-chemical and microbiological studies of incoming raw stock and finished products.
Thus, some 4,668 pieces are made, and these make up 350 kg of a product. An automated French pancake line, the only one in the Far East, is operating. Pancakes are made with twelve different fillings, the dough is mixed and fed to a frying drum. The secret recipe for dough was selected by the company's technologists for a very long time until the dough was light and lacy. And very tasty. Stuffed dough is automatically wrapped in ready-made pancakes. Then the product goes to freezing at a temperature below -18 degrees.
Yes! We make them manually. In the era of machines and production automation, we leave an island of manual labor. Handmade dumplings are prepared by professional dumpling makers. The average speed of by one employee is 6 dumplings per minute. During the 12-hour shift, our miracle employees hand over for freezing some 350 kilograms of dumplings.
Finished products - pancakes, dumplings, vegetable dumplings, and so on are delivered for deep freezing in a special multi-tiered chamber, via the transport belt. There, the products undergo deep shock freezing on average for 20-35 minutes. The temperature in the chamber is 35 degrees.
Next, the mincing site is the heart of the Sausage shop. This is where a unique taste of the product is created, a beautiful pattern on the cut and density are regulated.
Raw meat is crushed in industrial meat grinders, mixed according to the recipe, then loaded into the cutter, where, thanks to three pairs of sharpest knives, at a speed of 4,000 revolutions per minute, raw meat is finely ground.
“Doctoral” sausages produced are enough to wrap the globe along the equatorial line. Now, going to the Smoked products shop. To create delicious and high-quality smoked meats or deli, we select the best chunks of raw meat.
They are given appropriate form. One of the secrets of a tasty and juicy meat product is the properly selected brine – a combination of water and spices.
For even distribution of curing substances, the raw meat is impregnated with the help of a special apparatus and special software under pressure with a clear amount of brine for each specific product. To bring juiciness to the product, raw stock is sent for massaging. This process takes place in special vacuum drums-massagers, in which due to friction of chunks against each other and the drum wall, the meat softens and the curing agents are evenly distributed. Next, the meat is unloaded and matures, and then is fed for molding and tying. Here the product is shaped, added with natural spices if necessary, hung on a lath and delivered for heat treatment.
And here we are at the heat treatment site. Here products are brought to readiness - they go through the stages of drying, smoking, boiling and cooling. All chambers are universal, work in automatic mode. Culinary readiness of the product is achieved when the temperature inside the loaf is 72 degrees. It is this temperature that ensures the death of the entire microflora. Each chamber is equipped with a special probe placed in the center of the loaf for control.
When the temperature reaches a preset program, a sensor is triggered and signals the operator that the product is ready.
From each frame, employees of the quality service check two loaves from two different sides. If there is any doubt about the quality of the product, the frame moves to a special compartment and waits for a verdict from the production laboratory.
Now you got to the Packing shop. It also has advanced high-tech equipment. In this shop the most stringent sanitary requirements are imposed in connection with the food safety.
To extend the shelf life, we use two packaging technologies – vacuum and modified gas environment. The use of these packaging methods allows for protection of products, extending shelf life and long-distance shipping. Since the geography of the company's supplies is the entire Far East of Russia.
