Preservation, marketing & sales

The mushrooms are then transported to our modern factory, where the crates are loaded onto a conveyor belt. First of all the crates are inspected and the barcodes on the crate stickers are scanned. The crates are then emptied and the mushrooms are blanched to ensure that they will retain all their minerals and vitamins.

The blanched mushrooms are subjected to yet another visual inspection in a special cabin. The next step is slicing for customers who want their mushrooms sliced.

The mushrooms finally pass through a metal detector to make sure that the product is absolutely safe before it is sealed in cans. The details of every batch of cans are scanned by our central Track & Trace system. Prochamp aims to keep records of every aspect of its product flow.

preservation-marketing-sales

The empty cans make their way to the filling machines via magnetic conveyor belts and transport lines. The filled cans are then topped up with brine in a separate machine. The cans are hermetically sealed with a lid and sterilised under pressure and at a high temperature. This is done to ensure that the contents of the cans can be kept for a long time without losing their nutritious value.

Our laboratory performs various tests to check the cans’ keeping quality. It for example checks the sealed joints and the mushrooms’ pH. The results of these checks are also recorded in our computer system. Then the cans are labelled. We of course also check the labelling because we want our Prochamp products to look perfect.

Our packaging machine arranges the cans in trays, which are wrapped in shrink film if that is what a customer wants. Our quality department then performs a final inspection. And the results of that inspection are likewise stored in our central computer.

Thanks to these constant inspections and our watertight Track & Trace system, all Prochamp products conform to the BRC/IFS and HACCP requirements.

Each pallet is identified with a unique sticker with another barcode containing all the relevant details. Via those barcodes we can within a few minutes check which substrate batch was used and which spawn, in which room the mushrooms were grown and how they were processed.