Bereket Döner was the first gyro-meat processing and distribution company in Turkey and remains one of the country’s largest producers of frozen, ready-to-cook gyro. The company needed to fix a slow, error-prone order process — and RES did it with something the industry had called impossible: RFID food manufacturing tracking in a moist, frozen environment.

The challenge

Bereket’s product was shrink-wrapped, shock-frozen, boxed, weighed, barcoded, and stored at sub-zero temperatures. When an order came in, employees pulled product, built pallets, and scanned each box’s barcode by hand — about three minutes per pallet, or up to 30 minutes if a barcode ended up sealed inside a package and the pallet had to be taken apart.

  • Order processing could take a long time, especially at peak hours, leaving pallets sitting out and risking product loss or compromised goods.
  • With only the boxes barcoded — not the product itself — and a 24-hour production schedule, there was no safeguard against internal theft.
  • Human error in tagging, assembly, and scanning meant inaccurate or incomplete orders could ship.

How the RFID food manufacturing system works

RES had been told RFID couldn’t work in Bereket’s moist, frozen conditions. It built a system that did. RFID tags are applied to the raw meat before it’s wrapped and frozen; at a commissioning station the product is weighed, packaged, and its RFID tag read and linked to a barcode carrying the SKU, production date, and weight. RES’s AIMS software was linked to Bereket’s database so information flowed between both systems with no changes to Bereket’s applications.

To process orders, RES built an RFID scanning tunnel with a rotating antenna. An assembled pallet is wheeled in and, in about 30 seconds, its contents and weight are verified against the purchase order with 100% accuracy — no hand-scanning, no taking pallets apart over a buried barcode. A correct order is marked sold and cleared to leave; an incorrect one triggers an alert for the missing, extra, or wrong items. RFID readers at every exit point of the distribution center sound an alarm if any unit that isn’t marked “sold” tries to leave.

The results

  • Order processing dropped from three-to-thirty minutes to about 30 seconds, weight-verified and 100% accurate — so even at peak hours, pallets no longer sit out too long.
  • Exit-point readers ensure every order ships complete, and make internal theft a non-issue.
  • The company now knows where its product is at all times — something previously impossible.
  • Long-standing gaps between physical and systemic inventory counts were eliminated.

“We had looked into using RFID but had been told that, due to our moist and frozen environment, the RFID technology could not be implemented. However, RES said they were up for the challenge, and, before they sold anything to us, they listened and tried to solve our problem… We now have full control of our production and deliveries, and there hasn’t been a single customer complaint since implementation.”

— Volkan Turk, IT Manager, Bereket Döner

The takeaway

RES didn’t just digitize Bereket’s process — it solved a problem others wouldn’t attempt, tagging product in conditions RFID supposedly couldn’t handle, and turning a 30-minute task into 30 seconds. That’s the kind of result RES’s RFID asset tracking is built to deliver. To see what it could do for your operation, talk to an RES RFID engineer.