It started with a small butcher shop in Gympie's Mary Street in the 1950s. Now Nolan Meats has just opened the largest fully automated meat chilling and distribution centre in the southern hemisphere.

Pat and Marie Nolan founded Nolan Meats in 1958. Their sons Tony, Michael and Terry operate the family-owned, vertically integrated business, which employs 405 people across four sites, including three feed lots to ensure consistent supply.

With this latest venture, Nolan Meats director Terry Nolan expected it would take several more months to fully commission the high-tech, multi-million dollar cold storage plant in Gympie.

"This has been five years in the planning," Mr Nolan said.

"We thought we needed to look at our cold chain security. We'd previously leased premises in Brisbane and we wanted to build a very modern cold store distribution facility."

Terry Nolan says while recent trading has been difficult, this latest expansion is about focusing on the future. ( ABC: Bruce Atkinson )

The technology was selected to ensure full traceability and increase efficiencies in high volume handling of chilled and frozen beef.

"I would like to say in a five to ten-year time frame that we could actually double our capacity," Mr Nolan said.

"So instead of doing 500 cattle a day we might get to 1,000 cattle per day.

"Meat processing plants are quite complex. Because carcases are of different sizes, shapes and thicknesses it's very hard to automate much of that.

"But once you have all your cuts off the carcass and you put them into a standard-sized box it becomes very easy to automate it.

Up to 3,840 cartons of beef can be plate frozen every 18 hours. ( ABC: Bruce Atkinson )

"A part of freezing beef is to freeze it as efficiently as you can to keep the product as fresh as you can and in an 18-hour cycle we can have all that meat hard frozen to -25 degrees Celsius.

"It presents better when it gets to international customers.

"It improves the quality of the meat, it improves the shelf life, improves food safety angles, so there are lots of bonuses," Mr Nolan said.

Around 70 per cent of Nolan Meats product is sold domestically, with the remainder exported to Japan, Korea, USA, Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt.

The cold storage room is 100 metres long. ( ABC: Bruce Atkinson )

The upgrade is also expected to deliver efficiencies in processing the chilled beef that is popular in Australia.

"We all know that beef as a protein can be costly for producers," Mr Nolan said.

"What we can do in the manufacturing is to try and take some of that cost out with some automation."

The distribution centre has a capacity of 86,000 cartons and is around 100 metres long, with shuttles servicing 23 levels.

Once a carton is ordered through the computer it is automatically collected and delivered via conveyor belt to be packed on pallets.

The distribution centre has a capacity of 86,000 cartons of beef. ( ABC: Bruce Atkinson )

Each carton is identified by barcode, allowing beef to be sorted by cut, MSA eating quality, and market destination.

"The beauty of this system is that the salesman can sit in their office, enter an order and in theory nobody touches the carton," Mr Nolan said.

"Once it leaves the boning room, it'll go into a cold store through the automated storage and retrieval system.

"A mixed order can go in and come out in perfect order to deliver to about 300 butchers between the Tweed River and Rockhampton."

Most of the cattle processed at the plant are fed at the company's Wide Bay feedlot at Cinnabar. ( Supplied: Terry Nolan )

"Those butchers are the lifeblood of our business and some butchers might buy one carton, some might buy six cartons so we could have eight to 10 butchers in one pallet and it's all come in perfect order and no human hand has touched it until it gets to the butcher shop."

Despite the move towards mechanisation, Terry Nolan said the company hoped to expand its workforce in the future.

"It does take some labour out but it sets us up for the future in that now we have a bit of overcapacity in our cold store, which we hope to grow into in the next five to 10 years.

"A part of that is that we need to extend our boning room as well.

"That site could have 700–800 people."

Korea is an important market for Nolan Meats. ( ABC: Bruce Atkinson )

Korean wholesalers and distributors were invited to the opening and taken to the Muster Cup race day to experience Australia.

"Korea is a very important to us," Mr Nolan said.

"A lot of people don't understand the complexities of world trade. You need every market in the world open at all times.

"A few years ago when Russia was accused of shooting down a Malaysian airlines flight, trade embargoes were brought against Russia.

"We were sending nightly flights to Moscow with high quality beef. That market was closed on a political stance, so it's important to us to have every market in the world open because sometimes they're very favourable and sometimes they're very difficult.

Nolan Meats hopes to double production within the next five to 10 years. ( Supplied: Terry Nolan )

"At the moment Korea, while it's an important market to us, it is quite difficult with the influx of US beef and we're finding that Australian beef is being slightly displaced in the Korean market because of cheap US beef.

"We're waiting for our Australian herd to rebuild, a couple of good favourable seasons, get that herd back to 32 million head and we think that Korea would be a good strong market for the future.

"We're making our focus around the Asia-Pacific, so Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the USA."

Gympie Mayor Mick Curran welcomes the investment in the region. ( ABC Rural: Jennifer Nichols )

Gympie Mayor Mick Curran welcomed the expansion.

"Nolan Meats is Gympie's largest private employer. That the family has made such a significant investment shows confidence in the region and there's certainly an opportunity for further job creation," Councillor Curran said.

"Today is only possible because of our enthusiastic and driven team of Nolan people who have been integral to this development and enabled this dream to become a reality," Michael Nolan said.

"This is our largest ever investment and it demonstrates our commitment and passion for our region and its sustainable growth."

Dependent on funding arrangements, Nolan Meats is also interested in becoming involved in research and development of DEXA technology, using CT scanning to help determine the eating quality of live cattle and beef carcases as well as advancing boning automation.

"If we can get an accurate skeletal diagram of the carcass and then adopt that into an automated chain where we can have a robot programmed to cut a particular joint, that's where the real benefits would come," Terry Nolan said.

It just goes to show how much has changed since that first butcher shop opened in 1958.