Online Documentation: Mixing flows for the Food Processing Industry
EZ-MES Implementation for making Processed Ham
The following figure gives a schematic presentation of the flow to make packaged
loafs of Honey Ham:
The first step in making processed ham is to dump several Combos (Big huge boxes
on pallets) of meat into a machine that perfoms 2 functions. It injects a pickle,
which is a brine solution into the meat and massages it, which means kind of shredding
the injected meat. a batch of ham is typically about 16,000 lbs.
At the far end of this machine is a big dumper that dumps the injected meat into
a number of vats.
The vats are taken to a cooling area (Although the whole factory is refrigerated)
where they wait and let the pickle marinate. After cooling for a while the vats
are dumped into a final massage machine along with some ground meat.
The final massage machine is a 2 step process, it performs final massage and then
stuffs the massaged meat into plastic bags. These bags are sent to a cooker.
The flow ends with the bags of meat coming out of the cooker, however depending
on whether the ham is being sold as sliced ham, or loafs of ham, and whether or
not there is a glaze on the surface, or a smokey flavor is added, the subsequent
processing is different.
Considerations: