Meat processors who visit TOMRA Sorting Food on Stand C78 in Hall 9.1 of Messe Frankfurt will be able to experience the advanced capabilities first hand.

In order to help increase customer safety and reduce waste, TOMRA features its groundbreaking and award-winning Biometric Signature Identification (BSI) technology. This technology is successfully deployed on over 100 TOMRA systems throughout the food processing industry.

This technology enables the machine to detect foreign materials by identifying chemical and molecular differences rather than relying on color differentiation. In addition, it has the ability to scan fresh or frozen ground meat or small trimmings.

Thorsten Niermeyer, business unit manager process analytics, says: “This is the world’s first comprehensive foreign material detection technology for meat processors. Previous technologies could only identify part of the foreign material spectrum, such as metal and bone. However, the biggest occurrences in the industry are plastic, paper as well as wood from various different sources, and this technology identifies all of these materials.

“Today, most processors invest in manual effort when inspecting meat for contaminants. In Europe, the dominant plastics in the meat industry are red and white, most problematic for the human eye to detect in meat. We are detecting these contaminants based on their chemical properties and can reliably distinguish them from same colored meat. The system will be introduced after the first processing stage, in order to detect the foreign objects as early as possible and avoid contamination of further product downstream.

“When foreign material is detected, we automatically stop the conveyor belt. The graphical user interface then indicates which contaminant is contained in the meat and thus identifies which portion of the product needs to be separated.

“Foreign material contamination isn’t only leading to public recalls, but generates a lot of ’in-house’ rework and waste. In the age of the internet and fast travelling information, increasing customer and consumer safety is at the top of every processors agenda. With TOMRA’s new technology meat processors have the ability to significantly reduce the risk of contamination and potentially causing harm to consumers.”

Thorsten continues: “This system complements TOMRA’s existing portfolio for the meat industry. The deployment of the existing QVision Fat Analyzer in the meat industry has generated a lot of feedback for us. Listening to the market and our customers is key to TOMRA’s success. TOMRA will launch the new system in September 2016.”

For further information on TOMRA’s foreign material detection technology, please visit Booth C78 – Hall 9.1 at the IFFA show.