A word for a place that produces food from animals

Question

I looking for a word, if exists, for a place where the animals like cow, pig and chicken are killed, cleaned and have its meat and parts processed into bagged foods like bacon, ham, beef, etc. In Portuguese we have a word "Frigorífico" for it, and translating this word I found theses meanings: Frigorific or Fridge. But, it seems to be incorrect to me.

Answer 1

The UK National Careers Service gives these categories of workplaces and employee roles, which suggest how things are generally split up here.

• abattoirs – as a slaughterman or woman, humanely killing and preparing livestock
  
• wholesale meat factories – cutting, de-boning and preparing carcasses before they are sold to retailers
• butcheries – specialising in preparing meat in line with instructions from caterers
• meat or poultry processing plants – producing and packing products for the retail and catering industries

I'm not sure that we have one term which covers all eventualities. Individual establishments will also carry out different parts of the processing. My local abattoir calls itself an 'abattoir and cutting plant' and does basic butchery for small livestock producers who take in live stock and collect the boxed up bits a few weeks later after the meat has hung and been butchered, but other establishments will only take larger jobs and ship out as soon as the carcass is skinned and cleaned.

Answer 2

Probably "meat packing plant" comes closest in the US, as it implies all stages of the preparation. "Slaughterhouse" could be interpreted as referring to only the front-end slaughter operation (though I vaguely recall that this is referred to as the "kill room" in the Hormel operation about 50 miles southwest of here).

Answer 3

One keeps food that must be chilled in a fridge, but animals are slaughtered at a slaughterhouse (compare matadouro in Portuguese: place for killing; in French, abattoir), after which their remains are then installed in refrigerated units to keep them cold so they don't rot as fast.

Answer 4

In the UK we'd call it an abattoir

a place where animals are killed for their meat

Cambridge Dictionary

Answer 5

High-processing packinghouse

is the term you're looking for.

Here are the distinctions made in the Netherlands for all type of meat processing plants, from a governmental website.

Categories of slaughter-plants

Plants for red meat slaughtering may be categorized on the basis of the final products. A plant that processes meat into products such as canned, smoked and cured meats is significantly different from a plant with facilities for slaughtering without further processing.

Slaughterhouses and packinghouses (slaughtering and meat processing) may each be divided into two categories on the basis of the quantity of waste produced (EPA 1974).

Slaughterhouses:

• Simple slaughterhouse:

A plant that slaughters animals and does a very limited amount of by-product processing. Its main products are fresh meat in the form of whole, half or quarter carcasses or in smaller meat cuts.

• Complex slaughterhouse:

A plant that slaughters and does extensive processing of by-products. Usually at least three of the following operations take place: rendering, paunch and viscera handling, blood processing, and hide and hair processing.

Packinghouses

• Low-processing packinghouse:

A plant that both slaughters and processes fresh meat into cured, smoked, >canned and other meat products. Only the meat from animals slaughtered at the plant is processed. Carcasses may also be sold.

• High-processing packinghouse:

A plant that also processes meat purchased from outside. Sometimes, a high- >process packinghouse has facilities for tanning operations.

There are also plants that do not slaughter themselves but restrict their activities to the processing of meat (meatpacking). These plants have a waste production comparable to that of a simple slaughterhouse.

It's also the official name in the US see this extract from Cornell Law School

For the purpose of this subpart: High-processing packinghouse means a packinghouse which processes both animals slaughtered at the site and additional carcasses from outside sources.

Answer 6

Since BRF S.A. was given as an example of the type of company you are looking to describe with this word, simple terms like abattoir or slaughterhouse are certainly not appropriate. This type of company is usually described as a conglomerate.

The word itself is not specific to the food industry, so in English this is specified with extra qualifiers in the phrase - ie (from the Wikipedia entry):

BRF, formerly Brasil Foods S.A. (BM&FBovespa: BRFS3 / NYSE: BRFS), is a Brazilian food conglomerate created from the merger of Sadia S.A. into Perdigão S.A.

The term Frigorífico is not standard Portuguese but is a specifically Brazillian term. The closest standard Portuguese term is Abatedouro, which is a cognate of abattoir. This doesn't seem to convey the same meaning of meat processing and distribution conglomerate, however, that you are looking for.

In fact, as best as I can tell, frigorífico actually means something more like an industrial meat packing plant rather than a food industry conglomerate like BRF. I would guess that a very large company like BRF would own many subsidiaries that you could call frigorífico, but the term seems too restrictive to describe the entire company. In fact, the Portuguese Wiki describes BRF as (emphasis mine):

A BRF [...] é um conglomerado brasileiro do ramo alimentício

It then goes on to describe several corporate acquisitions :

Em outubro de 2011 a BRF faz duas aquisições na Argentina, comprando as companhias Avex (empresa frigorifica) e Dánica (líder argentina na fabricação de Margarinas) por 150 milhões de dólares.[14][15]

So, BRF is big enough to have acquired several frigorífico companies, but itself is a larger organization, even producing goods like frozen foods, margarine, etc, that are well beyond the scope of purely meat products.

Answer 7

I would suggest Meat Locker as fitting this definition (although this may be a specific usage in the American Midwest).

As well as being the name for the actual cooler in which slaughtered meats are kept (similar to the "Frigorífico" translation), a meat locker can also refer to a facility that slaughters, processes, and sells cuts of meat and further processed products such as sausages, hams, and bacon. Some meat lockers also serve ready to eat foods, such as tenderloin sandwiches or barbecue, or offer additional services such as processing deer or wild pigs during hunting season.