BRAPTA, DOROTA CIURUS

The beginnings of the company date back to the year 1998. As a forester and a hunter, I often used to have talks about hunting and nature preservation with my Polish and foreign friends. This is how I gained in conviction, that feeding wild birds has become necessary nowadays. Together with my wife we started to work on the first trial recipes for the winter food for birds. Both our observation of the birds' nutrition, and their lifestyle itself caused that those first recipes included ground seeds of wheat, corn, and flaxseed, ground rowanberries, cereal weeds, etc. Since then, the recipe has undergone many changes. We dipped all the ingredients in warm fat, of course, and we formed the balls manually, closing them within plastic nets, just like the ones used for packing garlic. Then, we decided to introduce aluminum ladles into the manufacturing process, adding some loose chalk to the mixture. 

It became a great event to construct the first production machine, a fruit of long evenings spent in my workshop. The machine was quite primitive, created on the basis of a manual screw press, with exchangeable matrixes, depending on the size of the fat balls. That "old lady" was serving us well for as long as two working seasons. The engagement and experience of the workers were so great, that we managed to reach a very good productivity.

A big market demand and the pressure to reduce production costs required further improvements in productivity. The balls-making press was modernized by replacing the screw drive with a hydraulic drive mechanism and by extending the matrixes to between ten and twenty pieces per matrix, provided with balls knock-outs. Constantly improved, the machine served us for as long as four years. In 2002 I took up the construction of a new automated machine for producing fat balls of three sizes. Because it was a prototype, its construction took over a year. I based it on my own ideas and on some well known construction solutions. 

At the moment we own a state of the art process line for fat balls production, made in Germany. The line ensures a very big productivity. 

We have also spent much time looking for a name for our product. The most interesting from the numerous ideas were: "THE BIRDS' CATEEN" and "FAT BALLS". 

Finally, we decided on "FAT BALLS" (the Polish original name actually means "Birds' Dumplings"). The name turned out to be a great success, for it caught on perfectly and the FAT BALLS became our flagship product.