Wanted: Optimal carcass valorisation 2.0

This article, the third and final part of a trilogy* on meat harvesting and processing, is a plea for modern-style optimal carcass valorisation from a food-tech perspective.

What used to be only natural for the butchers and home slaughterers of yore remains a major challenge for today’s residual meat industry: achieving optimal carcass valorisation. Optimal carcass yield is the ancient art of achieving optimal utility for each part of the animal, first and foremost an economic issue. Today, however, a dear moral duty has been added: achieving maximal societal utility. Megatrends such as global population growth and impending food and raw materials shortages make ever-increasing moral and technological demands on the meat industry, while the risk of new food crises needs to be minimised. Within these economic and ethical parameters, optimal carcass valorisation 2.0 emerges, optimal utility for both industry and society; people, planet and profit.

The meat chain

Within the meat industry, great efficiencies, and thus added value, can be achieved by optimally overviewing, monitoring and connecting the entire chain, from hog to hot dog. This chain consists of farmers, slaughterhouses, residual meat producers and processors producing final products. While each party involved tends to have a good overview mainly of their own part of the production process, a food technological approach adds value by overviewing as well as monitoring the entire chain for optimal economic and societal utility. It does so, among others, by connecting supply and demand within the chain, allowing for optimal carcass valorisation 2.0 to take place.

The chain from hog to hot dog includes many food-technological factors which have great and direct impact on the characteristics and the perceived quality of the final meat product. Characteristics such as colour, structure, tenderness and bite all depend on the handling of these factors at various stages and times in the chain.

Farmers and slaughterhouses are the first link in the chain. Factors such as breed, pedigree, feed, animal stress during the slaughtering process and meat ageing at this stage largely determine the quality of the raw material entering the chain.

Next, the bone material left over after deboning reaches the residual meat producer, who turns it into mechanically separated meat (MSM), a semi-finished product. In this process the MSM producer exerts great influence on fibre length, damage to muscle fibre structure, calcium content, meat protein percentage, as well as moisture and collagen content through the pressure applied in the harvester, filter size used, filling level and capacity of the chamber as well as the marrow content of the meat.

The final processor then designs the final product, influencing remaining factors such as the muscle-marrow-protein balance, water and fat binding capacity, taste and bite. At this point, the previous process steps have all left their mark on final product quality. The degree of muscle tissue damage during harvesting, for example, affects water-binding capacity, fat-binding capacity and bite of the final product.

Thus, purchasing MSM leaves processors with only relatively few factors to be influenced in their own part of the process, with all the other factors already having been influenced at the earlier stages of breeding, slaughtering or meat harvesting. Potential (partial) neglect of these factors by the other parties previously involved can only be remedied by the processor using relatively expensive additives in order to still achieve the product specifications required. Thus, awareness and traceability of how each quality-determining factor was handled at every previous stage of the process is of the greatest economic and societal interest to the meat industry and, ultimately, to the consumer as well.

Optimal carcass valorisation

It is exactly this holistic approach, this integral insight into the intrinsic quality of the raw material, into one’s own production process (for MSM producers), and into the product specs and applications desired by the customer, that enables maximum value addition to the chain, throughout the chain. It should be noted here that a high degree of industrialisation of the production process reinforces the increase of efficiency substantially (compare to Part 2 of this trilogy*).

MSM producers with insufficient information about the quality of their raw materials run the risk of significant value loss, besides obvious quality risks. Likewise, not knowing the specs of their customers’ final products may incur unnecessary cost for either party, often both. A good example is the production of chicken nuggets and Dutch frankfurter sausages, snacks often made from separated chicken meat and pork.

The residual meat harvested from chicken breast cap carcasses is often uniformly processed in frankfurter sausages at a relatively low unit price, whereas expensive chicken breast fillets are unlikely to be shredded and processed in chicken nuggets. Nevertheless, it would be distinctly possible to harvest a high-grade meat from the breast cap carcasses first for use in the chicken nuggets. The remaining lower-grade meat could then be used for the production of frankfurter sausages, making both products more efficient and therefore cheaper, without noticeable loss of quality. At the same time, the expensive breast fillets would thus retain their highest possible market value.

The above losses are purely economic and could be easily prevented by producers of MSM through product traceability, demand orientation and quality differentiation in the process. This can be achieved by entering into partnerships with both suppliers and customers, with whom agreements can be made about specific bone types (and hence qualities), such as pipe bones, rib bones or backbones. Customers should inform their suppliers of their exact residual meat usage and their meat-quality requirements.

The food technologists should overview this entire process and optimise the final product based on this information. Together with farmers, slaughterhouses, MSM producers and further processors, the food technologist establishes and achieves appropriate quality across all stages for each meat product - no more, no less. Thus (s)he achieves substantial savings for both MSM producers and processors by optimally using each part of the animal. This is old-fashioned optimal carcass valorisation, modern style: highly industrialised and transparent.

Full transparency and traceability also contribute to the societal confidence in residual meat products. In a fully transparent residual meat chain, the products on the shelves have been created in a ‘verifiably controlled’ manner - a sign of professionalism, reliability and safety. As such, transparency offers a great opportunity to further enhance the industry’s image.

Moreover, optimal value creation may help the industry respond adequately to the societal need and global megatrend of sustainability, for example, through the stimulation of clean-label production methods or the reduction of product movements, transport steps and product mileage. The societal awareness generated by full traceability of bones and residual meat may well prove to be an incentive for local purchasing strategies and perhaps even far-reaching chain integration under the same roof. Provided that labour-intensive processes are further automated and the final product is made at the very end of the chain whenever possible, local purchasing, production and processing will remain economically feasible, even in high-wage countries.

This clever and exciting interplay between striving for the highest economic utility and doing good for people, animals and planet constitutes optimal carcass yield 2.0. It requires in-depth insight into the raw material and the chain processes as well as the talent of optimally matching supply and demand within that chain. It also requires uncompromising transparency about the product, an open mind and eye to the outside world and a highly industrialised production process. Behold our challenges!

Conclusion

The entire trilogy carries a clear, unambiguous message: the meat industry needs to proceed towards a rational, industrial, streamlined and high-tech production process. The dairy and poultry industry have led the way in process automation and chain integration, to great success!

The hardware is ready for it: the current generation of meat harvesters is able to combine high capacity with consistently high meat quality and will soon even become high-tech management tools in the most complex of production processes.

The production process itself should consist of as few steps and product movements as possible and therefore take place locally, preferably under the same roof. The most labour-intensive activities should be automated whenever possible, while the process should be designed to allow for optimal differentiation and value creation. This requires a willingness to diversify as well as great flexibility on the part of the MSM producers. To achieve both diversification and flexibility, the creation of final products should be deferred until the end of the production process as much as possible.

Knowledge of and information about the raw material, the process of meat harvesting and the specifications of the processor’s final product should be available to and shared with the entire chain. The handling of the factors affecting meat quality must be transparent, traceable and controllable at all times, to those within and outside the chain. Only by combining thorough knowledge with full transparency to one another and to the outside world can the meat industry achieve the professionalism the world so desperately needs. Call it optimal carcass valorisation 2.0.

*In the November/December 2014 issue of What’s New in Food Technology & Manufacturing, ‘No time for waste: technical developments in meat harvesting’ showed that modern technology is rapidly turning machines into highly efficient means of productivity, soon even management tools. In the following issue, ‘Turning hogs into hot dogs’ established the value of industrialisation and integration of the entire meat chain, from production to final processing.