(Excerpt from Livestock and Meat Business Magazine by Fermin Diaz)
Tondo, Manila-based RSRH Livestock Corporation recently inaugurated its new abattoir and meat cutting plant in Marilao, Bulacan. It is a world-class facility designed to raise the quality standards of locally produced beef, create jobs for the community, and serve as a channel in developing the country’s cattle industry.
The plant blessing and inauguration ceremony was successfully held despite threats of strong winds and rains brought by Typhoon Gorio. Over 200 guests and well-wishers, including company suppliers, project financiers, meat retailers, and customers from the food service industry attended the occasion, extending their felicitations to the Hernandez family who owns and operate the facility.
Meat regulators who attended the event said the modern establishment has the requisite features and operating systems to be accredited as “AAA” slaughterhouse by the National Meat Inspection Service (NMIS) of the Agriculture Department. As such, this should qualify the abattoir to become the country’s only fully-operational meat plant eligible to sell beef not only domestically, but also for the export market.
Channel for cattle industry development
RSRH Livestock President and CEO Raymond Hernandez also told guests the facility stands as a humble testimony of achievement to the long decades of hard work and perseverance made by his lowly parents and company founders who started a butchering and meat retail enterprise more than 40 years ago in their struggle to escape poverty and earn a living.
He said that as a way of giving back the blessings of business prosperity RSRH received from God’s grace and mercy, the family corporation will act as good steward of the Lord’s resources by putting the facility to productive use and be of service to the community and country.
“We envision this plant to generate jobs,” Hernandez earlier told LaMB Magazine in an interview. “It will also become a channel for developing the cattle industry by encouraging livestock raisers to produce animals that reach good market weight even as we seek support from the NMIS and local governments in advocating for meat safety and animal welfare,” he added.
The 42-year old RSRH official also called on players in the beef supply chain to join a campaign to develop a culture of good citizenship among livestock producers, suppliers and agribusiness players, saying some people in this sector are only driven by self-interest and employ unscrupulous business practices in their dealings instead of pursuing the common good.
“Some industry people are power trippers and selfish,” he lamented. “We hope suppliers will join us in conducting business where deals are made based on integrity, fairness, transparency, compliance with government laws, and willingness to pay the right taxes,” he said.
“Sana, magtutulungan ang mga livestock institutions, farmers, the academe, local governments and NGOs in building up our livestock industry because it plays an important role in developing our economy,” he added.
Strategically located
The slaughterhouse sits on a 5,200 square meter lot in Barangay Sta Rosa I, along Villarica St. in Marilao, Bulacan. It is accessible, being strategically located only a kilometer away from Exit 23 of the North Luzon Expressway (NLEX), a vital road connecting Metro Manila with the rest of central and northern Luzon. Close to it is a provincial bus station, a large cold storage warehouse and the head office of a listed feed company.
The integrated complex has a covered area of 3,500 sq m., of which about 2,000 sq m. comprise the main operation building whose inside temperature is controlled by a centralized air conditioning system.
Plant’s salient features
Inside the plant are different compartments for slaughtering, meat cutting and meat fabrication, butchers’ dressing room, rest rooms and wash area. Included, too, is a cold storage facility that can chill, freeze and blast freeze beef carcasses, primal and choice cuts, even entrails and offal.
Workers at the slaughtering and meat cutting sections use modern wares for their operation, like hydraulic and pneumatic tools and equipment for stunning and dehiding animals as well as for cutting, sawing, splitting and deboning carcasses.
Overhead, one can also see mounted railings with trolley and gambrels that can be controlled to transport carcasses automatically from the slaughtering area to other sections of the processing line.
The main building also features a meat inspector’s office, a fully-equipped laboratory, control room, a large function room and a chamber for an NMIS meat control officer.
The facility likewise boasts of a 600 sq.m lairage or animal holding pen capable of accommodating up to 100 head of fully fattened cattle before they are led to the butcher’s knife.
One purpose of the lairage is to maintain a reserve of animals so that the processing line in the abattoir can operate at a constant speed and not be affected by variation in the rate of delivery of livestock, said RSRH Vice President and chief operating officer Richard Hernandez.
While current number of animals butchered reaches 50 on a four-hour work shift per day, the company needed a lairage of bigger capacity in anticipation of higher volume of animals to be slain to cater to rising beef demand, said Richard, elder brother of the president.
He pointed out that while most livestock raisers would sell their abattoir-bound cattle upon reaching a market weight of between 350 and 400 kilograms per head, those eligible for slaughter at the new plant should be fatter as to reach a desired weight ranging from 420kg to 450kg.
“This ensures that only from a prime cattle can we produce prime beef,” he said.
Next to the main edifice is a three-story administration building where offices of executives and staff are located. The building has also a spacious multi-purpose hall for work-related gatherings and for social events.
Another feature of the abattoir is its hide salting warehouse, where export quality salted cattle hides are produced as a by-product of slaughter operation, giving the company additional revenues. The hides are cured only with rock salt and fumigated with potassium permanganate and formalin and shipped to both local and overseas clients for them to make various leather goods.
The plant complex is also equipped with a waste water treatment facility, a guardhouse, and a machine room where electrical control, refrigeration equipment, steam boiler and power generating sets are located.
Abattoir as training center
But one noble and enduring goal the new facility aims to fulfill is to become a world-class training center for slaughterhouse operators, butchers, meat cutters and meat fabricators while its owners attend to their business as livestock end user and beef producer for wholesale and retail distribution.
Officials said this job-generating initiative will not only address the growing domestic shortage of workers skilled in abattoir and meat fabrication operations. They said it will also open a huge overseas employment opportunity for trained and skilled individuals to work in slaughterhouses, meat shops, commissaries, hotels, restaurants and similar establishments abroad that offer higher pay and benefits, often 8 to 12 times bigger than locally-offered rates.
“We are working through our consultant, former NMIS executive director Dr. Dimalanta, to get TESDA accreditation for us to be recognized as training center on meat cutting and other related traded skills,” Raymond Hernandez disclosed.
RSRH Livestock Corp. traces its humble beginnings back in the early 1970s when patriarch Romeo Hernandez worked as a butcher in Marulas, Valenzuela and later at the Vitas abattoir in Tondo, Manila, while soon-to-be wife Rebecca Medina served as a helper of a street vendor selling pork and beef offal and entrailsat the Asuncion public market in Divisoria,
While enduring contempt and ridicule by other vendors and neighbors for selling lowly meat by-products, the Hernandez matriarch persisted with her trade while her husband engaged in cattle slaughter and beef retail. The business gradually grew to become a commercial success, which their children attribute to hard work and to their family’s strong faith in God.
From a few hundred bucks in sales over 40 years ago, RSRH now generates nine-digit annual revenues as the country’s foremost beef carcass and primal cuts supplier to various customers. It delivers beef raw material requirements to meat shops in different public markets of Metro Manila, and supplies meat to big restaurants and large food service companies including Max’s Group of Companies and Goldilock.
The company is in the list of Top 5,000 companies in the Philippines and one of Manila’s biggest corporate taxpayers.
From lowly entrails to world-class slaughtering facility, the company has truly come a long way.
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