A story dedicated to the food industry
Ing. Prior, the first question is a must: how and why was ME Food Solutions founded?
Firstly, I want to point out that: Millennium Engineering is the name of the company. ME Food Solutions is the brand that we created later.
Millennium was founded in 1996 after my graduation. I graduated in mechanical engineering in Padua, while my sister earned a degree in foreign languages, also in Padua.
Once we completed our education, we looked at each other and tried to figure out what we could do next.
The enthusiasm that we had and the fact that we were still together led us to start a business from scratch.
We literally started from scratch and day by day, with a lot of sacrifices and overcoming many obstacles, we managed to grow our business more and more.
Today we have 50 employees, two offices in Italy, one of which has just opened in the northern part of Padua (for information click here), third one in Russia in a city called Voronezh, and now we are going to open a branch also in the USA, in the area of North Carolina.
Sacrifice and dedication: two secrets of the patents of ME Food Solutions
What, in your opinion, are the strengths of Millennium Engineering?
Our strengths?
We work in the food industry. And to explain it fully, I must tell you a little bit about what we do.
From 1996 to 2010, we were engaged in the processing of stainless steel. Thus, we have always created custom-made spare parts for industrial kitchens (counter tops, refrigerator and oven doors and all the details that you see inside industrial kitchens).
In 2008-2009, a deep crisis arose. Despite our skills and appreciation for the accuracy and quality of our work, the market scaled down. But by that time, I had gained experienceas an employee in the company.
This difficult moment prompted me to think about our new product: creating solutions for food processing, processed foods that we buy daily in refrigerated shelves in supermarkets or bakeries, etc.
So, we started and studied the product processing system, which led us to create a patented tape (find out by clicking here), which transports the product through an environment designed to maintain certain temperatures for cooking a finished product.
For example, we load the productat the entrance, and as soon as it arrives at the exit, the product becomes frozen and has a core temperature of -18°C, the product can also be chilled, leavened (likecroissants) or pasteurized like a lot of food that we eat and buy: for example, tortellini.
As a goal for the future, we plan to develop industrial furnaces, as we work with high temperatures and can offer new solutions for the market.
Always “customized” for the customer, round and " clean”
Returning to your company’s strengths?
Customize the product as much as possible.
That is, there is the difference between us and our competitors from northern Europe, who are very rigid in their construction, in their ideas, and we try to satisfy the needs of the customer and therefore to be able to stay within limited spaces, collecting the product from anywhere and returning it to wherever the customer wants. We try to achieve this, and I do not remember an episode in which we did not succeed.
Another of our strengths is that we pay manic attention to hygiene. Today, we are consuming processed products more and more, therefore, we need to pay as much attention as possible to hygiene during production so that the product is always “clean”. Therefore, despite the difficulties, we decided to always use round shapes, because it is more difficult for dirt to settle in round profiles.
If we consider as an example the very popular today “pinsa”, we will see that it is covered with a large amount of flour on the surface. When entering the cooling chamber, the product collides with powerful fans that blow away a large amount of this flour. Then, when the product moves from vertical to horizontal surfaces, a large amount of flour settles, which provokes the appearance of mold and bacteria, which are extremely harmful.
Therefore, wedecided to go against the flow and started using round profiles: they are much more difficult to work with, but they guarantee a better result for the clientand the end user.
(If you want to go deeper, visit our “Hygiene Philosophy” page).
How do you achieve all this?
We have built a young team of innovative, proactive and positive people. Therefore, we are always ready to accept their contribution and new ideas and personal insights which relate to the construction of these machines.
The great experience of the “veterans” of Millennium Engineering supports and stimulates the enthusiasm of the new generation and guarantees the continuous evolution of ME Food Solutions projects. Never stopping is essential to be ready to meet new challenges!