Meat manufacturing: tools to optimize production

The essential guide to process optimization for meat processors

Optimizing production processes is essential for meat processing companies to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Whether it is crafting targeted solutions to specific operational issues or helping to improve the processes of the entire production process, Braincube understands the unique challenges of meat processing.

This guide includes high-value use cases from our meat manufacturing customer base.   

Optimize recipes

Meat manufacturers may manage dozens, if not hundreds, of different recipes. Time of year, dietary fads, and changing materials availability add strain to an industry already beyond capacity. Consumers rely on your meat to have a consistent taste, texture, and cut. Even if you’re trying to be consistent, you still must innovate, optimize recipes, and create more efficient operations.

In a world where you can’t do all things well, consider digital tools that can support your initiatives such as recipe optimization. Digital tools can track, display, model, and among a variety of recipe management needs. Storing every recipe’s parameters digitally enables operators to quickly and seamlessly execute all of your unique recipes, however, what if you can improve your recipes?

With Braincube, you don’t have to choose whether you shut down lines to test new recipes or if you keep running at a high cost to avoid a temporary shutdown. Our tools help food manufacturers test and iterate production recipes without wasting valuable resources. In fact, Cargill, a Braincube customer, was able to increase their new recipe production by 400% a week.

Whether you are looking to expand recipe production, increase equipment availability, or reduce changeover times, understanding critical parameters that you can optimize is critical for cost reduction. Yet you need multivariate AI capabilities that can help you to interrelate variables so that you know how adjustments impact output. For example, Cargill needed to identify the optimal set points to improve boiler efficiency without decreasing steam output. They knew how to do each initiative individually, but they didn’t have a way to contextualize the thousands of parameters involved. 

For meat producers, recipe optimization is paramount for growth. Say, for example, you want to identify the optimal recipe that maximizes injected water volume while still meeting quality specs. To better understand all of the possible production scenarios, you must equip your staff with tools that drive their progress forward. Gone are the days of endless data clean up and dissecting datasets in Excel. 

Digital tools like Braincube can help you drastically increase your recipes. Cargill increased their recipes by 400% per week by adding Braincube to their tech stack. Optimal recipes keep you producing efficiently at high volumes, though it’s not just time to check your recipes, but rather, what tools will support substantial progress?

Improve process control

With so many stages in meat production, moving animals from farm to fork is an intricate science. Chilling, cooking, pickling, grading: meat processing steps require strict control measures to keep costs and scrap to a minimum. All of these steps can be better controlled with centerlining. Sure, you’ve been centerlining for years, but is it automated, scalable, and actionable? If not, there’s a better way.

Product digital twins can contextualize each parameter in your process. It encapsulates thousands of production parameters, continuously updated in real time for business usage. This allows teams to virtually tweak their parameters and recipes to see expected outcomes without wasting valuable resources, time, or money. With the Advanced Analysis App from Braincube, AI can help you uncover important operating parameters that you may have never considered. If a piece of equipment is unstable, how can you optimize production before you’ve stabilized it?

Many food companies rely on Braincube to support their centerlining initiatives. Our tools automate production standards tracking, control charts, and SPC reports. Process engineers can create custom, templatized control charts that track near real-time SPC for improved process and quality control. Whether you are looking to track compliance with SPC and production standards or have faster, more accurate responses to drifts, Braincube helps you to make executing production in real time more attainable with automated production reports. 

And with Braincube’s prescriptive operating conditions, changes can be sent to the shop floor for instant application. 

With the right process and quality control tools, teams can monitor the precise settings that cause specific product outcomes—and resolve issues before they generate larger impacts.

Aubert & Duval, a global metallurgical manufacturer, produces products that must adhere to strict aeronautics regulations. The company knew digital tools, like IIoT, could provide them with a global view of their process parameters. In turn, they could understand which (and how) individual process parameters impacted specific product characteristics. Within just a few months of using Braincube, they reduced defects on a reference product by 18% and improved compliance by 32%.

Avril, a long-time Braincube customer, values the autonomy that Braincube brings. They want to benefit from process improvements while still having complete control over company decisions, both now and in the future. They use this data in live time and in production meetings to improve performance. Given the Braincube data treatments and toolset, Avril has improved yield, saved energy, and long-term and predictive maintenance.

Automated process control tools make your teams more efficient and your results more attainable. 

Summary

Recipe optimization and process control are paramount for growth. To better understand all of the possible production scenarios, you must equip your staff with tools that drive their progress forward. Automated process control tools make your teams more efficient and your results more attainable.