Summary
Northern Co-operative Meat Company (NCMC) is Australia's largest cooperative. It is located in New South Wales northern rivers region. It employs approximately 1000 people and has 1500 members. NCMC partnered with MLA in their 3 year Collaborative Innovation Strategies program, aimed at improving the innovation capability of the red meat industry. During this period, NCMC co-invested in innovation projects to the value of $1.5m.
Over the 3 year program, NCMC successfully carried out a number of high risk technical projects, including beef scribing and the RTL beef boning technology. They focused on a processing efficiency rebalancing exercise throughout their boning room as part of a wider innovation capability development program facilitated by MLA. As a result of these projects resulted in labour efficiency gain of 14% in their boning room. Technical projects brought additional gains to the company.
The program was undertaken for a second phase for an additonal 3 year period (P.PIP.5002).