ANZCO Foods

About ANZCO Foods

ANZCO Foods is one of New Zealand's largest exporters of beef and lamb products, handling over 200,000 tonnes annually across growth-stage abattoirs, automated processing lines and temperature-controlled distribution centres. The company runs multiple production plants and supporting sites nationwide.

‍

From its headquarters in Christchurch, ANZCO sources livestock from family-owned farms across New Zealand, channels stock through purpose-built abattoirs and processing facilities, and manages complex cold-chain logistics with distribution centres in key export hubs.

‍

Behind each shipment is a network of over 3,500 employees and partnerships with dozens of regional logistics providers, all coordinated through digital systems that require fast, reliable data links to ensure traceability, compliance and on-time delivery.

‍

‍

The Challenge

By early 2025, ANZCO's network was a bottleneck. Legacy routers and switches frequently failed, and single-path Internet circuits offered no redundancy. Brief interruptions on high-speed processing lines forced manual workarounds for temperature-sensor alerts, halted conveyor-belt operations and disrupted VoIP communications between plant and executive teams.

‍

The IT department spent over half its time firefighting these incidents, delaying strategic projects like an ERP upgrade and IoT sensor pilots. A cohesive, redundant network architecture was urgently needed to restore production continuity and free IT to focus on growth.

‍

‍

The Solution

Cello's engagement began with a series of structured discovery workshops, bringing together ANZCO's operational team and IT leadership to map every point of digital dependency – from conveyor-belt PLC controllers and packaging robotics to centralised SCADA dashboards and VoIP handsets.

‍

Armed with this detailed blueprint, Cello designed a robust LAN refresh that replaced over 300 legacy switches with next-generation, PoE-capable hardware, reorganised cabling pathways to eliminate single points of failure, and implemented VLAN segmentation to isolate critical control traffic.

‍

Concurrently, we deployed our SmartWAN service across ANZCO's wide-area links. Each site received dual Internet circuits from independent carriers, underpinned by policy-driven traffic steering and automatic failover to 4G LTE for sub-second switchover during primary link interruptions.

‍

Quality-of-Service rules were finely tuned to prioritise time-sensitive SCADA telemetry and VoIP communications, while less critical flows seamlessly shifted to secondary paths under load. All devices and links feed into Cello's 24/7 Network Operations Centre, where real-time dashboards and proactive alerts trigger automated remediation workflows and monthly performance reviews.

‍