TRIMSCAN · TRIMSCAN, making SME meat processors more competitive by using automatic in-line fat analysis in meat trimmings

Meat trimmings are the main ingredient used for the production of many meat processed products like sausages and hamburgers. The EU is the world’s second largest producer of pork and beef meat trimmings with Tm 17M by year. Trimmings are typically produced at slaughterhouse to be sold in standard bins of 10, 25, 35 and 60 litres. The bins are manually prepared by trained operators to obtain specific fat content. The bins are then paid by meat processors according to the amount of fat, the lower the fat content the higher the market value. However, fat content in meat trimmings is not precise having variations in the order of ±5% which often represents a cause of dispute between the slaughterhouse and the processor.In meat processing, the control of fat in meat trimmings is of vital importance to ensure homogeneity and quality of the final product, to reduce the lean meat over-use and to comply with legislation and customer specifications. A fat variation larger than 3% will produce substantial economic looses and a number of industrial problems. Excessive salt content, poor texture, hard surface, appearance and odour and product spoilage are the most common quality problems. Manual sampling, recipe adjustment, poor binding capacity and problems during slicing of the product are the most important industrial problems.The main goal is to develop a contactless, in-line fat analyser that will automatically determine the fat content in EU standard bins with accuracy better than 1.5%. TRIMSCAN project will provide SME processors and slaughterhouses with a practical tool at an affordable cost to make them more competitive by reducing the expensive lean meat over-use by at least 2% and to avoid the need of time consuming sampling and recipe reformulation. TRIMSCAN will substantially improve and simplify the production processes by homogenising the quality of the final product and by reducing the percentage of rejections in at least 2% due to products that do not meet the legislation and/or customer of specifications. TRIMSCAN represents a real business opportunity for the SMEs of the sector.