Gourmet food at a gallop

25-Jan-2008 - Last updated on 16-Mar-2017 at 03:14 GMT

While innovation is key, processes that give extended shelf-life are still the holy grail for ready meal producers, says Paul Gander

County Durham's Tanfield Food Company has achieved fame for bringing complex recipes such as Wild Rabbit with Leek & Elderflower Sauce and Camargue Red Rice within reach of the average British household. As long as that reach extends as far as the middle supermarket shelf, that is.

Its Look What We Found range of ambient ready meals, soups, sauces and gravies, with an emphasis on the provenance of its exotic ingredients, has been available since March 2005. Just over a year later, Tanfield began to automate its processes, and has ambitions to treble the current annual output of over 3M packs a year within three years.

In packaging terms, the backbone of the brand remains the stand-up pouch, of which up to 2,000 can now be filled and sealed in an hour, claims co-founder Keith Gill. Previously, the figure was only up to 600 an hour. Tanfield has also developed a range of round, sealed trays, subsequently sleeved. The dual-ovenable trays are aimed at the out-of-home market, including vending.

Tanfield likes to use the term 'pressure cooking' for the in-container process used with both formats, but they are essentially sterilised in a retort.

Shelf-life extension

According to one major UK supplier of retort technology, the volume growth in these systems is in applications for pasteurised, chilled ready meals rather than sterilised, ambient ones. Holmach md Chris Holland explains that retailers are keen to see shelf-life extended beyond the seven to nine days typically achieved on chilled meals. They want to have meals in-store for two weekends rather than one (an important distinction for sales). He adds: "Some retailers are seeing 4% wastage on chilled ready meals, and it's hugely important for them to address this."

In an Indian range, products such as chicken tikka masala may be high-turnover. But most retailers will want a full range of recipes, including slower-selling lines. According to Holland, the growth in Metro-style local outlets, with their lower footfall, has accelerated this move to pasteurised, longer shelf-life ranges.

However, pasteurisation is no general processing panacea for ready meals, and many items will need separate cooking, in any case.

Richard Burke, md of equipment company BFS, has for the past year been supplying the US Lyco Clean Flow cook-quench-chill system. The unit operates as a huge metre-diameter auger, where air is pumped through the cooking (and subsequently cooling) water and helps to drive product down the length of the screw. Unit sizes start at 500kg.

Says Burke: "From an HACCP [hazard analysis critical control point] standpoint, cooking to a certain temperature is essential, but so too is consistent cooling, where temperatures have to be reliably reduced to an acceptable level." The air injection system accelerates heat transfer at both the heating and cooling stages, reducing overall processing times in comparison with other equipment, he adds.

Typically, the Lyco system is used for the starch component in a meal but also performs well when blanching vegetables. BFS says the automatic cleaning cycle between products can take just 15 minutes, allowing multiple changeovers in the course of a single day.

Of the two UK installations to date, one is part of an operation making prepacked, frozen meals for the foodservice sector. In the second, mashed potato is prepared either as part of a chilled ready meal or else as a separately-packaged product in its own right.

Meal component trend

While consumer demand for cheap, all-in-one meals is unlikely to fade, this trend towards prepared and pre-cooked components, packaged and sold as 'separates', is one to watch. Opportunities for higher margins go beyond the fact that retailers are selling two (or more) packs rather than one. They also rest on the supplier's ability to optimise quality and shelf-life by processing and packing the various ingredients in different ways.

Back at Tanfield, the product handling and dosing/depositing stage sees a predominantly manual operation combined with high-accuracy weighing, in this case, courtesy of a Fresh Food Weigher (FFW) from Ishida Europe (see p49). Linear belt feeders deliver meat, fish and vegetables to non-stick hoppers. This technology has helped Tanfield to reduce product giveaway from around 3g to less than 0.3g, says Ishida. As marketing manager Torsten Giese puts it: "If you are going to automate a ready meals operation, you start with the weighing systems."

Speeds using an FFW linear feed system are likely to be 40-50 parts per minute (ppm), says Giese. But over the past year, the company has been offering an alternative approach. The Screw Feeder Weigher twins a screw infeed with a circular multi-head weigher, and can be used to transport product such as lumps of protein towards the weighing hoppers at a consistent rate. According to Giese, the advantages are that it does not require manual feeding, unlike the FFW, and product will not form clumps, as can happen with a vibratory infeed. And with the screw system, speeds are closer to 70ppm, he says.

Tanfield, having started with single and then double-head manual pouch sealing systems, now seals these packs on a semi-automatic Toyo Jidoki retort pouch filler. The limited number of trays are sealed on a pilot line from Proseal. Gill hopes this will be replaced by a semi-automatic system in the future.

From its point of view, Ishida sees the tray sealing stage of the line as one where automation can successfully be combined with improved quality control. This starts with the sealer itself, says Giese, where both the modified atmosphere packs (MAP) and seal quality can be tested on-line.

Like pasteurisation, MAP is one of the preferred routes to longer shelf-life in chilled ready meals, where appropriate. The latest generation of Ishida tray sealers will check that the gas mix is within supermarket specifications. And if, say, one tray out of a set of 10 is not delivering the correct mix, one servo-driven tooling element can be shut down while the others continue.

Keeping production going is the key. Giese explains: "Given current margins on supermarket own-label ready meals, a manufacturer may only be making money on the last half pallet out of 10. So one hour of downtime per day can mean you make no money on a given production run."

Overall quality control is of vital importance if even greater penalties are not going to be imposed by retail customers. But each manufacturer has to decide what the risks are and how much it will invest. For instance, Ishida can now supply its seal testers with integrated vision systems, with a price tag of around £25,000, says Giese. Adding X-ray detection (at £35,000-£50,000), check-weighing and weigh-price labelling, the total bill might come to £125,000.

"You can envisage a fully-integrated quality control system incorporating all of this," Giese says. "That's what the supermarkets want." Whether manufacturers feel they need this level of security, or can afford it, is another matter.

Sleeving sees growth

When it comes to secondary packaging processes, Kliklok-Woodman (KW) says it has seen a huge increase in sleeving for ready meals at the expense of the fully-enclosed carton. But cartons remain important, particularly in the frozen sector.

According to marketing manager Michelle Tatum, this preference can at least partly be explained by the fact that trays may distort during freezing, and cartoners tend to be more forgiving when it comes to packing non-standard shapes.

Nonetheless, pressure to reduce 'excess' materials is mounting. Packaging optimisation working groups recently set up by the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) and the British Frozen Food Federation (BFFF) will no doubt take a view on this and other aspects of weight reduction.

The latest addition to KW's range of end-load cartoners is the Celox high-speed machine, which has been several years in development. There are few machines, if any, in this market reaching these speeds of up to 325 cartons a minute (cpm), says Tatum. One major US ready meals manufacturer has already taken delivery of a Celox.

The higher-specification Celox-H includes a webcam and onboard troubleshooting, as well as e-mail alerts to a remote PC. Servo-assisted 3D size change is manageable in around five minutes, she says, but the high output makes this machine more suitable for longer runs.

Other cartoning options from KW include the SFR, which can hit speeds of 150cpm on six-inch pitch, or 120cpm if the pitch is doubled. Its modular design means that infeeds can be selected to suit the product range. Findus UK now has one of these machines, packing frozen Meat & Potato Pie in 500g and 900g trays.

Sleeving output tends to be slower than anything achieved in high-speed cartoning. Versions of KW's Certiwrap machine can handle 80 and 150ppm. "It's tricky keeping the sleeve aligned as you wrap it around and glue it at high speeds," says Tatum. "But we have produced a couple of higher-speed customised models running at up to 250cpm." FM

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