Article: How optical sorting can maximize protein content and increase the value of your meat and bone meal

Several factors, namely the humanization and premiumization trends in the pet food industry, are encouraging suppliers to reevaluate the efficiency of their processing infrastructure and invest in innovative processing solutions such as optical sorting.

Remove foreign material

Foreign materials can include anything from tiny pieces of colored chicken plucking fingers that stand out in the final product to fragments of ear tags. Due to the nature of the raw material used in pet food processing, plastics, stones, washers and wood can also be found from time to time. In the rendering industry, optical sorting serves to automatically detect and remove undesired material from the product stream to significantly enhance the quality of the product.

Increase protein levels

For a renderer, the main objective is to create the highest possible value from meat offal; while they usually operate in the background, renderers have played a key role in maximizing resources long before the idea of a circular economy came to prominence. By targeting the bone content and removing it from the product stream, the ash content decreases and the protein level increases. A higher protein content significantly increases the value of the product.

Be an industry leader

Due to the B2B environment renderers operate in, they have little exposure to the pet food consumer. They are, however, directly impacted by consumer demands. In a highly competitive pet food supplier market, rendering companies that implement optical sorting technology showcase their desire to tackle industry challenges and will, as a result, increase their market share.

Talk to one of our Meat & Bone Meal Sorting Experts today and find out how optical sorting can work for you.

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