Create value with cubing

Not all cubes are cubes 

There’s a difference between whole-muscle cubes and something that looks like a cube. Whole-muscle cubes may vary from chopstick cubes in Asia to finger food bites and skewers in Europe and America. The highest-value products are always fixed-weight cubes consistently and well presented with the same surface to pick up the same amount of coating.

Boost the worth

How to boost the worth of the raw material then? Marel’s product specialist Morten Dalqvist answers, “Whether it’s breast meat or leg meat, skin-on or skinless, Marel has the solutions to add most value by creating perfect fixed-weight cubes. Each individual piece gets the right shape and the right weight to go on a skewer or to be sold as finger food. This is truly creating a higher value for deboned products, because you can ask a higher price for the extra effort you have put into the raw product.”

Higher kilo price 

In supermarkets, chicken products are increasingly sold in convenient portions, because consumers can prepare these products more conveniently. If processors can already deliver chicken in the correct portion sizes, customers are willing to pay more. The further you move away from the whole bird, the higher the kilo price. Creating cubes from trimmings or from whole muscle products can, therefore, be a way to become more profitable. A fixed-weight skewer with vegetables, for example, is a very pricey product.

New ways of production 

Morten Dalqvist states, “The starting point is always to create a higher value from your raw material, which can be achieved by exploring new ways of production.
At Marel we have configured various standardized concepts where the volumes are high, and where the quality is high too. Are you making cubes for supermarkets? There is one solution for this. Do you make skewers, cubes for fast food or other fixed weight cubes? Then Marel has other flexible, scalable and effective solutions for that. We can offer a high-speed line or a smaller line that can still create the same products.”

Cubing line 

“Our Marel standardized cubing concept makes it easy to produce added-value whole-muscle products. No matter the capacity, the level of automation, or the flexibility needed, our scalable concept will always meet the requirements. Now, poultry processors can maximize the utilization of their deboned leg meat, thigh meat or breast meat. But value creation is also about getting as much done with minimum human involvement. That’s also possible with this cubing line. We used to have two people on the line, now we can operate it with one person alone.”

Loading and TrimSort

The challenge of a portion cutter is always the person who loads it. An operator might get tired or not always load correctly. Placement on the belt really determines yield and quality. A robot does this job better than any human being. RoboOptimizer also does it much faster, because the capacity is way higher. The TrimSort option of the I-Cut 122 portion cutter is also very useful in this cubing line, because it automatically takes offcuts, trimmings, remnants and off-spec cubes out of the flow and does not require labor. Even in a fast high-volume cubing process, TrimSort succeeds in identifying off-cuts, however small they may be, and removes them from the cubing line for transport to a different process. TrimSort therefore guarantees a completely ‘clean’ A-quality product stream. No other solution in the market can do this.

Value creation

Morten Dalqvist summarizes, “Marel can help processors add more value to their whole muscle meat. The closer you get to a finished product for consumers, the more price-worthy it gets. This is true for supermarkets, for the QSR market and even for food service. 
It can be done with trimmings or off-cuts, or even a whole deboned leg, thigh or breast product. Marel processes also reduce staffing, as evidenced by the unique TrimSort and RoboOptimizer automated solutions. That’s also value creation.”