Adding value with coating: a homestyle crunch, not made at home
Coatings add value and variety to any protein product, from poultry, meat and fish to alternatives. By utilizing a variety of coatings, processors of prepared and ready-to-cook meals for distribution through retail, food services, or Quick Service Restaurants can quickly and efficiently meet the growing demand for increased meal variety.
All coating comes with challenges. Whether crispy, golden homestyle, traditional breadcrumbing, or specialist coatings like cornflake or panko. To achieve a high-quality end-product that looks good and always meets consumers' expectations, processors need equipment that can provide repeatable consistency. Marel meets this demand with a full range of coating solutions.
Using the same base product and changing the type of crumb is a simple way for processors to increase their product portfolio. Marel coating equipment offers exceptional flexibility and provides perfect, uniform coverage on all sides of the product, so processors can be confident in meeting rigorous product specifications on appearance and taste.
By separating coarse and fine crumbs, the RevoCrumb allows precise control of crumb flow onto the product enabling processors to achieve high-quality end-products that jump off the retail shelf.
When Plukon Food Group, one of Europe's largest poultry processors, were facing a problem of uniformity in their cornflake-crumbed products, production manager Eric Verspeek worked with Marel to find the solution. "During processing, large and small particles naturally separate. This separation is something you do not want to see reflected in how the end-product looks. The appearance of our products needs to be the same, day in, day out. When working with a cornflake coating, this means we need to get exactly the right balance of large and small particles on every single product. With the RevoCrumb, we can control the crumb and ensure even coating on every product, both top and bottom sides. The products look better than ever before and now have the uniformity that we are looking for".
Homestyle coating is in high demand with Quick Service Restaurants. The coating must be layered onto the product to create that flaky, homestyle texture. Marel's RevoBreader uses a gentle tumbling motion, which drops and tumbles the product into the coating without damage, gradually building layers for the optimal, flaky, crunchy result with high volume throughput.
The German processor G+G Convenience Produkte needed a breading machine with the flexibility to produce various end products, from tempura nuggets, cornflake-coated nuggets to homestyle breaded chicken wings and fillets. Production manager Eduard Knagge turned to Marel's RevoBreader. "Right from the start, we have been very happy with its performance. It produces high-quality products and has proven to be a very flexible machine. On all of these production lines, we use the RevoBreader in a different way: as a pre-duster when we're making tempura nuggets, in flatbed mode when we make cornflake-coated nuggets and in drum mode for homestyle wings and fillets. Thanks to the machine's flexibility, we really get the most out of our production lines".
The RevoBreader responds to multiple coating challenges with flatbed, drum and predusting modes in one enclosure. With less than two minutes needed to change between modes, processors have the flexibility to meet the rapid changes of seasonal product demand with minimal downtime.
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