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Auckland specialist manufacturer Adept has made its billionth piece of a small but vital component of the international meat industry.
The privately-owned Morningside-based company recently saw its billionth "meat clip" roll off the production line.
Used widely in meat plants throughout the world, the tool reduces or eliminates contamination during meat processing.
Adept produces more than 110 million clips annually, of which 28 million are used in the United States cattle industry. The company also has 95 per cent of the Australian cattle market.
Director Murray Fenton said the drop in the exchange rate had seen the recovery of good margins, while demand was so strong the company had had to order another moulding machine, double tooling, and keep the factory running 24 hours, seven days a week in order to cope.
But Fenton said the beginnings of the meat clip came entirely by chance.
"We made our first prototypes in response to a phone call from a slaughter board supervisor at a local lamb processing plant who wanted us to look at how to stop the ingested stomach contents being spilled during processing. It took us two years to get something that worked and we had a high failure rate - at times I wished we hadn't even started."
The meat clips have been in production since 1977, but took off in the 1990s when refinement made it more user friendly. Australia became the first export market and the clip became crucial for the New Zealand and Australian meat industries' battle with strict EU and US export regulations.
Fenton said six attempts have been made to copy the clip but only one had been successful.
"The clip is virtually impossible to sell without intimate knowledge and access to meat processors, and in the years we've been involved, we've been in and worked in 400 or so plants."
