Ole Aaberg, plant maintenance manager, Danish Crown Sæby, Denmark, plant

Danish Crown, Europe’s largest meat-processing company, has meat-production facilities and sales spanning the globe. When other Danish Crown facilities started to change out their lubricant products, the plant in Sæby, Denmark, decided it was time to upgrade to a plant-wide lubricants program that aims for the best lubrication practice in safety and quality across the board.

The Sæby facility is one of the largest pork slaughterhouses in Europe, with 1,100 employees processing 50,000 pigs and 2,500 sows a week, primarily for export markets. Processing 832 pigs per hour from early Monday morning until late Friday night places great demands on the plant’s equipment.

Engineers at Danish Crown had searched for years to find a lubricant with the right adhesion to stick to the overhead trolley system without dripping down on the carcasses below as they are conveyed through the plant. Previous products used had failed in this respect, and risked contaminating the meat that was travelling to the next stage of the slaughtering process. Following several visits from Petro-Canada’s Danish Distributor Petro-Chem AS, a sample of PURITY FG Trolley Fluid was provided for trial.

“We tested PURITY FG Trolley Fluid from Petro-Canada Lubricants, and we knew after the first use that it was just as free-flowing as other lubricants we tried, but it had surprisingly better adhesion. You typically find these types of oils only in specialist firms and at much higher prices,” explains Tommy Dahl, plant maintenance engineer.

Ole Aaberg, plant maintenance manager, adds: “The oil from Petro-Canada performed the best at the right price.”

Following its success with PURITY FG Trolley Fluid in this application, Danish Crown in Sæby dropped all other competitive lubricant brands and is now lubricating everything — chains, bearings, gears, hydraulics — with Petro-Canada Lubricants.

“We switched all of our lubricants to Petro-Canada, and since then we’ve seen amazing results and reduced our purchases from $198,500 ($194,500 USD) to $90,200 ($88,400 USD) per year,” Aaberg explains.

The success of PURITY FG Trolley Fluid at the Sæby Plant was a deciding factor that led Danish Crown to select Petro-Canada Lubricants as a key partner in upgrading all of their plants in Denmark.