Marel: Adding value to your fish product line
Market demand continues to rise significantly for convenience fish products. Whether they are fish fillets, fingers, or cakes, consumers are looking to spend less time preparing a healthy meal and more time enjoying it. Valuable raw materials like off-cuts, trims, mince, or frozen blocks can be turned into profitable value-added products.
Are you looking to diversify your processing capabilities and add value to your fish product line? Marel offers various solutions to produce value-added fish and seafood products, and coating is no exception. Marel's coating systems can supply the appropriate application for virtually any type of coating, delivering the exact process sequences needed with efficiency and ease.
Presentation plays a significant role in a consumer’s purchasing decision, so it is vital to perfect your coating when producing breaded whitefish products. Coating not only enhances the look, taste and texture of your product but also increases yield and protects products from damage during freezing. It adds bite, flavor and color to your product, as well as weight, stability and value. The number of possible coatings is endless.
When producing perfectly coated products, such as fillets and fish cakes, good batter coverage is crucial, but it’s challenging to get an even layer on all sides of the product. The Active Batter Applicator ensures just that. The machine’s innovative design with active under-bed technology transfers products onto a layer of batter before touching any belts laying an ideal foundation for a good coating.
The RevoCrumb uses an innovative crumb-management system to produce perfectly coated products. The crumb-management system separates the coarse from the fine crumb and gives you control over their flow onto the product. This state-of-the-art system guarantees the perfect, all-around appearance and lets you independently adjust the top and bottom layers to ensure optimum coverage.
Thanks to the RevoCrumb’s unique paddle-wheel design, you can rest assured that the crumb structure remains intact during processing. The RevoCrumb does not grind or crush, making it particularly suitable for fragile crumbs such as coarse panko or cornflakes.
"When we developed our innovative coating equipment, we incorporated changing market requirements, like premiumization and higher quality products. We combined that with a higher level of flexibility and process stability. Crumb management enables our customers to create top products, with a perfect particle definition, at high volumes", says Mark Boom, Product Specialist of Convenience at Marel.
When creating convenience products, a frying process is often used to fixate the layer of coating. Marel fryers offer the highest oil circulation speed in the industry. This ensures a highly stable frying environment and ideal transfer of heat to products, for maximum product consistency.
Furthermore, thanks to the high oil circulation, Marel fryers require lower temperatures compared to other fryers. This leads to lower energy usage, which can add up to considerable cost savings. Mark Boom, Product Specialist Convenience at Marel explains, "In typical industrial fryers, the heating element has to reach 280-300°C (536-572°F) to bring oil to the correct process temperature. However, Marel fryers can achieve this with the heating element at a lower temperature, for example, around just 260°C (500°F)". Cooking oil spends less time in direct contact with the heating element, so it reaches the right temperature quickly and without overheating.
The quality of your products is highly dependent on the quality of the oil they’re fried in. Oil quality degrades irreversibly as it’s exposed to high temperatures and debris that falls off product during cooking. A sophisticated frying system can greatly slow down oil degradation, so processors can reap the many benefits of longer-lasting, higher-quality oil. Oil temperature and filtration are the key factors in maintaining oil quality, and Marel technology optimizes both.
Industrial frying systems can be equipped with a variety of filtration systems to keep the oil as pure as possible. Boom explains, "As standard, the oil that circulates in an industrial fryer is filtered by an internal filter at the end of the fryer that removes the larger particles. However, by adding an external filter, even more particles and smaller can be removed from the oil". Ultimately, Marel’s frying and filtration technology means that processors can have utmost confidence that their products will be cooked to the highest standard and in a more cost-effective and sustainable manner.
Consumers set high requirements for the products they consume. They want to be able to order or buy products with the same characteristics every single time. That is why convenience products have to meet strict product specifications set by customers in retail or food service. End products need to be consistent in weight, dimensions, color, and overall appearance. To meet these specifications, it is essential that you have a consistent and controlled production process, day in, day out.
There are numerous ways to add value to a fish processing line and deliver the high-quality products that consumers want to buy. Whether you are looking to increase your current production capacity or diversify your product portfolio, we have the solutions to maximize your raw material. Marel is a partner with deep-rooted knowledge of food technology, an in-depth understanding of further processing and is always one step ahead of consumer demand.
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