Information
Our solution for portioning and packing whole muscle steak to fixed weight packs has a number of configurations to suit your production requirements and throughput.
Portioning and manual packing
This case ready line with an I-Cut 55 PortionCutter and a manual packing table is ideal for companies with small to medium production lots requiring frequent product type changeover or many Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) per shift.
The Whole Muscle Steak Line suits any kind of tray styling method, from simple to complex styling patterns: shingled slices, flat styling, head-to-tail styling, butterfly or fishbone styling patterns. The system is also suitable for decorative packing style, such as; edge peppering or for packing additional decorative items or cooking additives in pack.
It caters for both catch weight and fixed weight packing of boneless meat. A Marel I-Cut 55 PortionCutter portions the meat primal into a customized and preprogrammed steak weight or thickness.
This line has six packing stations with tables and scales. An operator counts the portions, makes the batches and styles them into trays. The styled trays are weighed and when the pack weight is within limits, the operator places the ready tray onto a tray conveyor for subsequent tray sealing and dispatch.
Portioning and semi-automatic packing
This application is ideal for simple styling patterns, such as flat packing, shingled style or upright styling and is well suited for medium to high volume dedicated production of few or single stock keeping units (SKUs) per day.
This case-ready packing line features efficient automatic vision-controlled portioning, and semi-automatic packing of sliced meat into fixed weight packs.
The Marel I-Cut 55 portioning machine (or other Marel portioning machine) is used together with a manual pace packing line.
The portioning machine cuts the meat primal into a desired preprogrammed slice weight. The cut slices are conveyed onto a pace packing line placed immediately after the portion cutter.
Trays are automatically de-nested onto a tray conveyor at conform speed with the slices from the portion cutter. One operator counts the slices into batches, as well as removes any trim and off-cuts from the slice stream. The next operators take the slices and styles them in the trays.
Completed trays pass through a checkweigher that registers the tray weight, the accumulated lot average weight, the weight deviations and the acceptance rate.
Trays that do not comply with the weight specifications are automatically pushed away from the conveyor to a rework table where an operator will adjust the trays before placing them back into the product stream. Trays that meet specifications will be conveyed to the tray sealer.
Portioning and automatic packing
This highly automated line is suited for high volume production with only one or a few SKUs produced on the line per day. The line is ideal for portioning, styling and loading of meat slices into pre-formed trays.
The typical applications for this line are shingled slices with a thickness variation from 4 to 30mm – and two to ten slices are batched together in a shingled fashion with slight overlap.
The system is flexible in scale and can comprise more volumetric portioning machines, such as V-Cut 160 or V-Cut 240 depending on throughput requirements.
Crust-frozen raw material is loaded into the volumetric portion cutter, which cuts the meat and stacks the slices into batches. The batches are conveyed to a batch loader that drops the batches onto a conveyor, keeping batches fully separated and equally spaced.
From there each batch of slices is automatically dropped into a tray.
The tray is check-weighed for average batch weight and the checkwegher feeds this information back to the portion cutter, which then automatically adjusts settings accordingly.
If the tray is within limits then it is fed directly to the tray sealing machine. Over- and underweight trays are separated for manual rework.
Features
- Fixed weight packs with low giveaway (depending on product and operators)
- High flexibility and quick changeover of primal types, styling requirements or tray size
- Can handle complex styling patterns
- Individual portion thickness from 8 mm and up
- Connectivity to Marel Innova software solutions