Chilled ready meals are creeping up on their frozen cousins, as consumers demand what they perceive to be less-processed convenience food. While the frozen sector accounted for 64% of the market by volume in 2004, that share had dropped to 58% by 2006. The chilled sector rose from 29% to 35% over the same period, according to the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB).
In terms of value, however, chilled occupies a much stronger position than frozen (Food Manufacture, June 2006, p41). According to TNS Worldpanel, the total ready meals market for the year to April last year was worth £2.377bn, with chilled taking a share of £1,901bn and frozen lagging behind at £475.5M.
"There are two types of shopper for ready meals," says Steve Banham, director of tray sealing equipment supplier Sealpac. "You have the people who buy frozen ready meals, which are usually cheaper, while other consumers want chilled, fresh food. This premium end is really the growth market."
Equipment suppliers are predicting that the rise of premium products will lead to different packaging requirements. For example, Banham predicts an increase in the use of aluminium trays as the required cooking times and temperatures increase to deal with larger pieces of protein, such as chicken breasts. In contrast, Neil Ashton, marketing manager of Packaging Automation, predicts a big shift towards cardboard trays among eco-conscious consumers who are ready to sacrifice price points in favour of easy recycling. "There will be a big shift to cardboard in the next two years," he says.
For the ready meal manufacturers, this shift upmarket presents significant challenges in both production and distribution.
"Manufacturers of frozen ready meals can produce, say, 300,000 meals to the same recipe over five days," says Ashton. "Chilled manufacturers don't have that option because they may only be producing a particular ready meal for half an hour before moving on to the next one."
Banham agrees. "People are trying to increase production speeds, but this tends to make lines less flexible. If you want to go really fast it suits operations where you spend the whole day doing one thing. The frozen food manufacturers can often do that because they're filling orders from the deep freeze, but a chilled supplier can't work that way."
Role of automation
Even so, automation does have a significant role to play in many operations, even if human operators must remain at the heart of the process. The most tricky areas are probably weighing and filling, since these require the cleaning or replacement of contact parts between each production run. This contrasts with sealing and packing operations which may only need retooling to deal with changes in pack sizes, rather than content.
Weighing specialist Ishida Europe has recently helped French manufacturer Le Magicien Vert to speed up its operation and reduce manual handling, even though it produces up to 25 different ready meal products on its line each day.
Ishida's Fresh Food Weighers (FFW) feature a series of linear hoppers fed by belts which an operator supervises by adding or removing product to maintain an even flow. "The FFW deals with difficult-to-handle products by using belts to feed the hoppers, rather than vibratory feeders," says marketing manager Paul Griffin. "Normal multi-head weighers are good for free-flowing products, but many of the sticky components in a ready meal need handling by a specialist machine."
The system constantly measures the weight in each hopper and uses the appropriate combination to meet the target weight. The FFW has raised packing speeds to 35 packs per minute and halved the number of operators on the line. It has also made the job much less physically demanding for the remaining operators.
Crucially, the weighing system can swap between recipes in just 15 minutes, partly because the contact parts can be removed without tools, and partly because racks of clean, ready-to-switch contact parts are kept adjacent to the weigher.
Marco Weighing's Linemaster weigh stations make changeovers even easier because they operate on the "take-away" principle. Rather than measuring the portions of the different components as they are added to the product, the weighers measure the drop in weight as operators remove each portion from a tray or container. Each weigh station in the system has its own internet protocol (IP) address - just like a network of office computers. When the time comes to change the production run, each station receives its new instructions instantly and the containers are simply switched over as appropriate. No retooling should be necessary.
"The Linemaster system has a dramatic influence on changeover time, which is one of the 'big six' causes of poor efficiency," says systems application specialist Colin Platt. "But the Linemaster take-away principle also ups efficiency by another channel by improving quality."
A traffic light indicator on each station tells operators when they are adding the right amount. Even if an operator is consistently working to the green light, they may be consistently adding a portion at the top end of the specification. Marco's novel automatic optimisation (AO) feature can spot this and tweak the station's parameters to bring them closer to the set point. The process is invisible to the operator, who simply carries on taking portions that give a green light. "We can get every operator working to within 0.1g or 0.2g of their portion size, so the overall product is manufactured to probably the greatest consistency ever," says Platt.
One of Europe's leading poultry producers is the latest to benefit from the system with the recent installation of 18 take-away stations on its ready meals line.
In search of the Holy Grail
Of course, the Holy Grail for chilled ready meals is to find a way of significantly increasing shelf-life. This would enable longer production runs and ease the logistical problems associated with getting fresh products to consumers. However, any advance on the current five to 10-day shelf-life seems a long way off.
Even today's established life-extension techniques can be difficult to apply when it comes to ready meals. For example, according to Ashton, only around 5% of the equipment supplied by Packaging Automation for ready meals is equipped for modified atmosphere packaging (MAP), even though MAP technology is widely used for other products, such as salads and raw meat.
Once again, it's the multiple ingredients and the need for flexibility that are the big stumbling blocks. "Different products require different gases," explains Ashton. "It depends on whether the bugs you're trying to discourage are aerobic or anaerobic, as well as on quality issues, such as using oxygen to keep meat red, for example. If you're changing the product every half an hour, it makes implementing MAP very difficult."
British shelf-life restrictions are primarily aimed at preventing botulism (www.foodmanufacture.co.uk, June 2006). Kaarin Goodburn, secretary general of the Chilled Food Association, believes that fundamental microbiological research is needed into alternative approaches of tackling the risk. "In the UK we use as little heat as possible to produce a high-quality product," says Goodburn. "On the Continent some ready meals are marketed with a shelf-life of a month, but that's achieved by cooking them to death. There's no market for mush in this country." Goodburn believes we need to explore fundamental new techniques, such as a way of detecting bacterial spores, for instance, that could enable manufacturers to fine tune the cooking process and extend shelf-life safely.
For now, there's no getting away from the shelf-life limitations on chilled food. However, improved logistics can reduce wastage and increase product availability. For example, specialist consultant Libra Europe was called in by Asda to try to reduce problems of wastage and on-shelf availability in its ready meals. At the time of the project, Asda offered around 300 ready meal products and the combination of waste and unavailability was costing the retailer over £15M. Libra's solutions managed to slash this by 25%.
Libra identified a lack of consistent reporting throughout the ordering system as a key issue. It brought in standard systems to replace the ad-hoc reports previously submitted to buyers. These had been sending confusing messages to suppliers, making it difficult for them to manage the supply of different categories effectively. Libra's strategy also implemented new ordering rules. For example, the daily split between products dispatched to a particular store used to be the same throughout the week. In fact, sales of different products tended to vary throughout the week, so the consultant devised a way of combining store and product behaviours to optimise the daily splits.
This type of measure can't solve all the problems associated with short shelf-lives, but it can go a long way to mitigate them. FM
Key ContactsBritish Market Research Bureau 020 8433 4000Chilled Food Association 01536 514365Ishida Europe 0121 6077700Libra Europe 020 7290 9020Marco Weighing Systems 01342 870103Packaging Automation 01565 755000Sealpac 0118 977 3400