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26 SEPTEMBER 2008 | PBEI
CASE
HISTORY
Thai Luxe Enterprises, Samutsong -
khram, Thailand, began as an exporter
of frozen seafood. In 1987, the
company began manufacturing shrimp
feed, and in 1993 it added extruded fish
feed. The feeds are mostly used to raise
catfish, tilapia, and carp. Over the last 5
years, feed sales have increased 20 to 25
percent annually.
Thomas Wilson manages the fish
feed factory and has helped increase sales
since joining Thai Luxe in 1997 as a feed
formulator. At that time, sales of fish
feed had little effect on the company’s
bottom line, because the shrimp-feed
business was main source of income, he
said. Even so, Thai Luxe managers
wanted the fish-feed business to show a
profit, and thus named Wilson factory
manager in 1998.
Factory reaches the limit
Before Wilson arrived, annual sales
totaled about 3 percent of the Thai market
for fish feed. Then, thanks to Wilson’s
reputation as a formulator, sales
increased by 19 percent in 1997. The
next year, with Wilson as manager, sales
rose another 19 percent. “I doubled
some parts of the process line, so production
could continue even if we had
breakdowns, and focused on product
quality and consistency,” Wilson said.
By 1999, sales were up almost 60 percent,
and the single process line reached
its limit. “We ran out of capacity in the
third quarter that year,” Wilson said. It
was time to upgrade the process.
First, the company doubled the size
of its extruder to 6 metric tons per hour.
Conveyor dryers
increase capacity, ensure
quality at Thai Luxe
FISH FEED MANUFACTURER HOOKS UP TWO NEW DRYERS.
A belt conveyor transfers moist extruded feed to a chute leading to the first of two conveyor dryers.
It then upgraded the other equipment
to handle the increased output, adding
two pulverizing systems, a higher-capacity
mixing line, a new cooler, and
more bin storage. As part of the extruder
upgrade, Wilson added a dual-loop
graphic controller. It interfaces with the
metering devices and valves that Thai
Luxe workers use to control the flow of
steam and moisture into the pre-conditioner
and the extruder. The controller
reduced moisture variation in the finished
feed by half, because it “simplifies
the job that the dryers have to do,” Wilson
said.
Next came the two-pass conveyor
dryer, which had been a problem for
some time. “We had a Thai-made copy
of an American double-deck dryer,”
Wilson said. It had required “frequent
maintenance after only 4 years of use,
and a complete replacement of the floor
and coils after only 6 years,” he said. “It
was not hard to convince company executives
that, while the locally made dryer
had cost only half the amount of an imported
dryer in 1993, it had not been a
good buy.”
Because of the recent overhaul,
how ever, “I was loath to take it out and
replace it,” Wilson said. “My decision at
the time was to increase drying capacity
by adding a small dryer downstream of
this dryer.” He consulted three suppliers
of drying equipment. One of them
was the Thailand-based agent of Aero -
glide, located in Raleigh, NC USA. “I
had read about [their] dryers before
coming to Thailand, and knew they
were very good”
Small dryer bridges capacity gap
“I was immediately impressed by
[the supplier’s] technical approach,”