Meat & Meat products

The global demand for meat and meat products is growing and sale of meat is built on a high degree of confidence on part of the customer. Therefore, it is essential for the product production to be of the highest quality standards. Meat is a very complex raw material where small changes in environmental or nutrition impacts (e.g. animal nutrition) can lead to large variation in the final quality. It is required by law to determine the amount of water, protein and fat in every type of sausage. Continuous analysis of fresh meat and other ingredients are necessary in order to meet these legal requirements and to ensure a constant batch-to-batch quality. This does not only apply to human consumption: almost one-half of the weight of any animal is mostly transformed by the processing industry into highly nutritional ingredients for animal feed production.

Fat is one of the most important parameters to control during meat processing. The industry has always struggled with deviations in fat content in raw material and finished products due to natural variations in the meat composition. Fluctuating fat content in the supplied meat, for example, can be a large problem for a sausage producer if he is not aware of it. Standardization of products more closely is desired goal and this, in turn, requires standardized production processes.

By understanding the needs of the industry, ZEISS developed NIR systems that help to meet the challenge of producing high quality meat and meat products with the right balance of ingredients. NIR enables rapid, simple and simultaneous assessment at the slaughterhouse or at the intake. NIR technology provides the analysis of raw meat (frozen or non-frozen) at-line and in-line with measuring times in the millisecond range. It can also control the quality control of the finished meat products at the packaging area. Integrated into modern equipment control and data management systems, the instruments are able to withstand the extreme demands of the production process and the highly corrosive effects caused by cleaning processes.  

ZEISS Corona process, combined with ZEISS ProcessAssist, is a complete and intelligent spectrometer system with precise calibration and intuitive software. It is able to perform a very broad range of measurement tasks directly on the mixer where minced meat or sausage material is processed.

The large spectral range, which covers the visible and the near infrared range, enables a broad spectrum of applications. The optics, spectrometer, electronics and referencing are all located in the same housing together with the measurement head. Since light guides are not used for the optics, light loss does not occur.

Due to its robust stainless steel housing, Corona process meets all hygiene requirements and may be easily integrated into technological processes. The automatic logging of the environmental conditions ensures reliable measuring results regardless of the sample height or vibrations.

This accurate monitoring system can be used downstream of a coarse meat grinder. This stage of the production process is often placed upstream of subsequent mixing devices to ensures the mixer is filled exactly according to the formulation. The meat product itself is subjected to very little mechanical stress and product quality is not affected. The analytical technology can also be used on the downstream processing devices, such as mixers or cutters. Very exact measurements are obtained when the system is used directly in the mixer. The measurements obtained are transmitted via OPC to the optimization software or to the control system.