Pursuing our passion for the highest quality horse bedding
The Process
Step one
Quality in Quality out!
Each day we receive hundreds of tonnes of woodchip into our factory. This chip is residue from Sawmill activities in the UK and in most cases from the mill right next door to our factory. No healthy trees are chopped down to make our pellets! This chip is 100% British sourced and from sustainably managed forests. No recycled wood!! This chip is put through our wet wood grinder to make it more uniform in size before being sent to the dryers
Step two
Make them sweat!
The chip arrives with varying moisture levels of between 40% and 60% depending on the season. To ensure a consistent quality and absorbent product, we need to reduce the moisture in the chip to between 10% and 13%. We do this by passing the chip through our brand new, state of the art Stela dryers. We make all our own electricity on site and these dryers use heat generated from the production of our Electricity to dry the chips. This makes the process very efficient and environmentally friendly
Step three
Grind them down!
The dried chips then run on a series of large conveyors into our huge Hammer mill which grinds them down to a uniformed sized, fine fibre in preparation for pelletizing
Step four
Squeeze them out
The ground fibrous wood is now conveyored into one of our 2 pellet presses where it is forced through thousands of 6mm diameter holes in the dies under extremely high pressure. This high pressure causes the wood to heat up incredibly and in doing so release and activate its natural lignin’s (like resin) which acts as a binding agent to hold the pellet together.
Step five
Chill them out
The newly formed pellets are then sent into 1 of our many pellet silos where they stay to cool down which allows the lignin to harden again and thus create a solid, durable and absorbent pellet
Step six
bag em up
The hardened pellets are tested for durability, absorption and fines levels to ensure they are of the high standard we require. Only the pellets that pass these tests are good enough to be called Blue Ribbon Horse Bedding pellets. These pellets are then bagged into whatever sized bags our customers require
Step seven
Ship em out
The pellets are then palletised by robot and shipped off to our lovely customers
