Meat and Poultry Processing

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Every food-processing plant today is looking for new ways to automate their process. It seems the most common method of justifying any robotic or automation project (including inspection) is labor replacement.

Sausage may have the dollar menu at McDonald’s to thank for its resilience last year. Savvy breakfast eaters could find sausage biscuits, burritos and McMuffins at their local drive-throughs, and other fast-food and quick-serve restaurants (QSR) — including a surprising rebound from pizza restaurants — offered more low-priced options.

When manufacturing sausage products we essentially do four things; comminute meat (comminute is a fancy word for reduction in particle size i.e. grinding, flaking, dicing or chopping), season the product, manipulate proteins and shape the product. How we perform these four activities produces the wide variety of sausage products available.

The meat and poultry industry is committed to ensuring a safe food product for our customers, maintaining the highest animal-welfare standards for our livestock, providing a safe and rewarding work environment to our employees, reaching out to the communities in which we do business, and working to minimize our environmental impact.

Though the Bryan Adams song referenced in the headline makes the task sound simplistic, to those of us in the meat industry, cutting like a knife isn’t always that easy

The term “process control” has a lot of different meanings depending on an individual’s background and experience. The definition from Wikipedia, for example, is “a statistics and engineering discipline that

Pathogens, new testing technologies and the government’s rules for controlling them are changing at an unprecedented pace - one which has not seen before in the history of food processing.

The discontinuing of unprofitable products and the introduction of new products is one of the trademarks of a successful meat processor. It can be very challenging to find ways to

Most whole-muscle products today are made using a process that is called either tumbling, massaging or mixing. Regardless of the name of the process, the main idea is to apply

Hormel’s brand new Progressive Processing plant in Dubuque, Iowa, opened earlier this year and recently became one of the first new-construction manufacturing facilities to earn gold-level LEED certification. Given that