A fully flexible production system for a meat analogue manufacturer
Meeting market demands by offering tasty, high-quality meat replacements was a top priority.
Background
This innovative meat analogue company was founded approximately 30 years ago based on one man’s determination to offer his customers higher quality food products at competitive prices, both directly to the consumer market and also as a supplier to the B2B sector.
Since the founding of the company, consumer trends have changed a lot. The general awareness of the environmental impact on every person’s day-to day-choices, as well as the responsibility producers are taking to lower environmental impact has increased significantly.
For many years, the company had been producing an entire product line of Meat Replacements (extruded vegetable protein from soy, beans, peas, etc.), which was mostly aimed for vegetarians and people with special dietary needs. Their offerings were quite slim and had limited variations in both content and flavour.
Five years ago, the company launched an internal project called “Future X”, with the vision of becoming a market leader within the extrusion of meat replacement products. With their motto of always wanting to lead development and not follow, they searched for a partner with same mindset, who could have a positive impact and provide solutions for achieving their goals.
The need
To create a sustainable future, the simple fact is that we will have to consume less meat per capita. The proteins we lose from the meat intake will need to be replaced by other sources. Our customer wanted to offer equal or higher quality alternatives, both in relation to taste and nutritional content.
Of course, changing a habit or routine by thinking that the consumer “must” change is difficult. Their vision is that the customer WANTS to change because the experience is better.
To be part of this global change, they realized they constantly needed to develop new recipes, improve texture and taste, and target areas where products could be applied in peoples’ day-to-day food consumption. A large part of this lies with the product development staff. However, they also needed a production solution which ensured that the products were produced safely and efficiently, without risk of the manufactured products changing characteristics.
Tekemas delivered a fully flexible production system, which allows safe recipe changeovers with minimal effort. The system allows full dosing and batch traceability of ingredients, making their products not only better, but also safer.
The right solution
The system that was installed included:
- Automatic batch dosing from big bags into batch IBC
- Manual, small quantity ingredient additions into batch IBC with weigh records
- Contained batch IBC mixing, eliminating cross contamination risk and giving full flexibility
- Full batch traceability of raw ingredients
