At the world’s premier trade fair for the food industry, ANUGA, Meat Tech Pro had the privilege to witness firsthand the leaps and bounds being made in meat processing technology. Among the standouts, awarded by the GERMAN AGRICULTURE ASSOCIATION – DLG, was the customized horizontal slicer designed explicitly for fresh meat. This equipment stands as a testament to the industry’s dedication to maximizing yield and precision.
The cutting of products is an important energy-intensive process in food processing, which is used in various industries, including meat processing, and is usually associated with quite a lot of food losses.
The market for horizontal slicing currently consists of inline machines mounted with a defined number of knives at a defined distance, a so-called “slicing pitch”. The lower belt of these machines is the working base, and the upper belt pushes the product through the knives. The fine-tuning of the machine has to be done manually. Due to the varying size and shape of the product (typically chicken breast or turkey breast), permanent optimization of the various cutting parameters would be required to achieve the best yield and quality.
As a result, the fixed and mechanical configuration of the current horizontal slicers raises two main problems: 1. the impossibility of fine-tuning the cutting parameters during production, resulting in poorer cut quality and difficult to control production; 2. the almost constant presence of a cutting disc on the top, due to the difference between the product height and the cutting pitch, resulting in lower yields and many product residues.
Compared to standard fixed thickness horizontal slicers currently on the market, the automatic customized horizontal slicer for boneless meat, specifically designed for poultry processing, is able to detect the size and shape of each incoming product and adjust the slicing process to maximize the yield and quality of the sliced product.
This is made possible by the use of a 3D scanner system to study the product combined with specially developed software and a patented blade movement system that allows the machine to automatically decide how many blades (from 0 to 6) to use, as well as automatically adjust the positions of the blades and those of the pressure parameters to minimize the unusable remnants of the product to be cut and, ideally, achieve complete zero waste.
The control of the cutting movement by an electronic actuator enables all cutting parameters to be easily modified in real time during production, so that each individual piece can be treated according to its individual cutting parameters and ultimately an average product yield of 96 % to 98 % can be achieved.
The energy savings and cleaner downstream handling process are also significant, with a corresponding reduction in the risk of contamination and an improvement in the shelf life of the product.
The system is compatible with other standard machines and can thus be easily integrated into existing production lines. Moreover, by adapting the software, this cutting process can also be transferred to other product areas.
