Fast and Accurate Weighing For Cooked Meat

The installation of an Ishida Fresh Food Weigher at leading German meat specialists Puttkammer Fleischwaren Spezialitäten GmbH has significantly increased throughput and reduced product giveaway.

The FFW is being used to pack Sauerfleisch, a North German speciality consisting of high-quality meat pieces preserved in a delicate but piquant aspic.  A vital step of the packing process is to get the right amount of meat into the pack so that topping up with aspic results in a consistent quality experience for the consumer.

Automated Meat Weighing

Previously this was done by hand but this was demanding work and highly labour intensive, while acceptable accuracy was only achievable at low speeds.  Because of the highly sticky nature of the meat, automated meat weighing via a traditional circular multihead weigher proved unsuccessful.sh

The Ishida FFW, by comparison, features six pool hoppers arranged in a linear fashion and fed by belts from an infeed table. The operator is stationed within comfortable reach of the product infeed, and adjusts the flow of meat so that each hopper receives a roughly equal amount.

Directly beneath each pool hopper is a weigh hopper and below that again a timing hopper.  This means that in calculating the best combination of hoppers whose combined weight comes closest to the target weight, the machine’s computer has more combinations to choose from and can therefore be faster and more accurate.

The FFW’s combination of overall operator control and proven combination weighing technology means that discharging equal amounts of meat into the pots is now much faster.  Non-stick plastic hoppers with scraper gates help ensure that the product keeps moving.

In four hours, the FFW can weigh one ton of Sauerfleisch, much more than the entire daily output that could be achieved using manual operation, while only two operators are now required compared to five previously.

To satisfy demand for different pack sizes Puttkammer has diversified from a single format to 280, 380, 500, 800 and 900g trays.  The simplicity of changeover – facilitated by the colour touch screen interface of the FFW – means that the automated production can respond very quickly to changes in demand, as for example when a particular product promotion suddenly takes off.

With the increased accuracy of automated weighing, says Lars Puttkammer, “The highest giveaway we came across so far was only 6g out of 380g (around 1.6%).”  This is a significant product saving compared to manual operations, which typically result in a product giveaway in excess of 5%.

Despite the control of the operator over the infeed, this method of automation greatly reduces both the overall amount of manual handling and the number of individuals who come into contact with the product.  In addition, hosedown of the weigher takes very little time, while all contact parts can be removed and replaced very rapidly for thorough cleaning.

Overall, the Ishida FFW represents a big step forward in bringing tasty ‘craft’ products to a wider public.  “The Ishida has preformed beyond all our expectations,” comments Lars Puttkammer.