As with many other food sectors, the poultry processing industry loses a considerable amount of money from wastage throughout the supply chain. Danish firm Scanvaegt has come with a range of solutions to help manufacturers cut costs by limiting giveaway at every stage of processing.
Scanvaegt points out that the retail industry pays food processing companies on the basis of the weight printed on the pack - not the actual weight of the product in the pack. Packing net weight trays manually often leads to a give-away of more than 10 per cent, and the company claims this figure is up to 6 per cent or more for automated packing methods.
Processing companies can therefore improve their bottom line significantly by reducing this overweight to an absolute minimum. Scanvaegt has developed and patent applied a concept that it claims offers give-away as low as 2 per cent or less.
The concept is already successfully operating in several poultry plants, proving its ability to produce net weight trays with unparalleled low giveaway. For certain popular products and pack sizes the giveaway is less than 1 per cent.
The patent applied DreamBatcher concept was developed for weighing and batching at high speeds to extreme accuracies, utilising Scanvaegt's UPT (Ultra Precision Technology). It offers a capacity of up to 360 pieces per minute per line. The concept comprises a twin automatic or semiautomatic infeed system feeding poultry parts to a twin high precision weighing unit, passing the weighed parts to the specially designed compact separator and packing unit.
Having integrated workstations to suit the capacity of the line, operators are allowed to remain at the workstations, all items for the packing operation, inclusive of the individual operator tray dispenser unit being within easy reach. Scanvaegt says that the machine and tray dispenser set up is easily adjustable from segment trays to family tray pack sizes.
After products have been styled at the workstations, each tray is easily placed on the appropriate take-away conveyor that leads to a ScanCheck checkweigher prior to wrapping.
The weighing results are achieved via a newly developed weighing machine, named ScanBatcher III. This concept secures weighing accuracies down to 0.5 grammes and at the same time protects the hermetically sealed, stainless steel, high precision loadcell, coming with a 3-year warranty.
The extremely low giveaway is achieved by means of Scanvaegt's patented CamelBack technology and the associated SuperBatching software package. This allows the DreamBatcher concept to secure giveaway of less than 2 per cent when tray packing chicken parts.
Scanvaegt has a long history of innovation in the field of poultry processing. The company invented the multi-channel grader in 1978 to allow food processing companies to grade and portion fresh food products to fixed weights. Since then, Scanvaegt has pioneered the technologies, techniques and applications required for efficient net weight packing.