COVINGTON, LA. — Allpax, a ProMach brand, has completed its transition to a new manufacturing facility in Covington. The new space spans 86,000 square feet, more than twice the size of its previous office and manufacturing area of 40,000 square feet.

The company made the move to support continued growth, especially after reporting a 100% increase in the size of its business over the last five years. The new facility is just a few miles from the old site, but offers significant improvements to operations, worker satisfaction, functionality, flow, training and testing.

“We are seeing unprecedented demand for new, expanded, and upgraded batch retort systems in the wet pet food industry,” said Jeff Arthur, technical sales director at Allpax. “The growth in the pet food market as a result of the rise in pet ownership during the pandemic and also from the long-term trend of pet owners wanting to give their pet’s a more premium eating experience, has been explosive over the past few years. Fortunately, this dovetails with our facility and resource growth strategy and plans, and as such, we have been able to absorb this extra volume of work both in terms of new equipment projects and increased aftermarket demands for parts, upgrades and services.”

Each functional area of the facility has built-in room for expansion as needed for future projects. The facility incorporates sequential flow from raw materials to finished products and has reduced fork truck traffic inside the plant by 70%, increasing productivity and reducing the risk of employee injury.

The company has installed two lift cranes to cover the entire manufacturing space, making the movement of retort and automation equipment between processes quicker, safer and more efficient, Allpax stated.

Additionally, the new site includes an area designated for Factory Acceptance Tests (FATs), where operators can test Allpax’s fully integrated, turnkey systems and train customers on-site. This is expected to result in a 50% faster installation and start-up time.

Allpax offers batch sterilization technology, batch retort engineering and manufacturing, and integrated automation solutions for product handling between batch retort processes to several industries, including the pet food processing industry.

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