Increasing Efficiency in Food Products
Bryan Carter - [email protected]
How do you use a vacuum to create a new product? It’s a very interesting concept that I’d like to share.
We have a great demand for boneless pheasant thigh; a demand so great that we often have a waiting list for it. This boneless thigh is used for making sausage, meat pies, jerky, snack sticks, etc. Each pheasant we process has only two thighs at approximately 4 oz. each, yielding about 1/2 lb./bird of boneless thigh. This makes it a small product with large demand.
One solution we found to create more trim was to purchase a Wizard Vacuum Trimmer. This equipment has a rotating blade in the shape of a cone with a vacuum line attached to the larger end. The Wizzard vacuum trimmer cuts the meat off the bone, vacuums it down a (food grade) hose and collects it in a bag at the end of the line. We are able to use this machine to remove any meat missed on the pheasant carcasses after they’ve been processed and remove meat from a previously unused part of the bird. The meat produced by this process is a very usable product much like the boneless thigh.
This machine afforded us an opportunity to create a new product with a vacuum, while filling the needs of our customers.