Getting the most out of your meat massager and marinater means choosing equipment that produces the same excellence—no matter what your batch size. You should expect every batch you process to have the same tenderness, the same diffusion of marinade/brine/flavoring, and the same yield improvement.
2,500 pounds of chicken breast should have the same consistent quality as 15,000 pounds. 5,000 pounds of processed pork butts should be indistinguishable from a 22,000 pound processed batch.
How do you guarantee this consistent quality when choosing your commercial meat massager? The easy answer is to use Challenge RMF’s massager/marinater. But we may be biased (our engineers certainly are!), so keep reading to let the science behind the massage lead you to your own conclusions about consistent product quality.
And when you want to talk in person, you can request a demo, or simply call us for more details. Our Challenge RMF team would love to help you get the most out of your product—whatever the batch size you need.
The Big Difference: How We Treat Your Meat
The meat massaging technology in your processing line can either introduce potential inconsistencies in your meat processing or create dependable results, regardless of batch size.
First, consider how the equipment treats the muscle and meat product you put into it, because tumbling and massaging are 2 different animals.
Tumblers: The MMA of Meat Processing
When you load your pork, beef, or poultry into your processor, that product shouldn’t face a cage match. Unfortunately, that’s exactly how tumblers approach tenderizing muscle tissue. Once the meat enters the tumbler’s “ring,” it gets body slammed for the entire processing time—and no one wins.
Pre-Designed Violence
Look inside the average meat tumbler, and you’ll find straight flights welded to the drum. Manufacturers can easily and cheaply attach and maintain straight flights. However, that makes the action much harder on the meat.
As the drum turns, these rotating “shelves” lift the meat and then drop it back down to the bottom of the drum. This delivers “hydraulic shock” to the meat, and the impact damages the muscle fibers.
If you took your prime rib home and spent the same amount of processing time slamming it on your floor, you get similar results to a tumbler. Fibers split, connective tissues fall apart, and your amazing cut of meat ends up looking like a pulpy mess.
Hydraulic shock emulsifies a muscle’s outer portions but delivers no tenderization to the core. That also means marinade or brine won’t bind evenly. They saturate only the outer muscle, leaving the core dryer and less flavorful.
The Bigger the Batch, the Worse the Match
With that “lift-and-drop” action inside the tumbler, the flights only affect the outside of your batch. When you load a tumbler with larger batches, it can’t consistently work the product. More meat misses the flights as the drum rotates, giving the outside product all the action while the middle/inside meat just spins in circles.
This also affects the distance the meat drops for the hydraulic shock. A tumbler depends on this distance to break up the meat’s structure, so the product in this large batch doesn’t receive the “full effect” that a tumbler is supposed to deliver.
With large batches, a tumbler creates both inconsistent action and reduced effectiveness. In the end, quality gets KO’d.
Challenge RMF Makes Quality the Winner
When comparing a commercial meat massager vs. an average tumbler, you’ll see that the Challenge RMF massager/marinater contains helical flights. These curved courses of stainless steel don’t lift and drop your product like tumblers do.
Instead, Challenge RMF Meat-on-Meat Massage™ technology gently but firmly moves, folds, and massages the meat. We don’t drop the muscle tissue, and we never use hydraulic shock that degrades the structure of your product.
Meat-on-Meat Massage™ stretches and compresses connective tissue fibers rather than destroying them. As these fibers lose their elasticity, the meat becomes more and more tender without experiencing degradation. This constant and even rolling action created by our helical flights carefully tenderizes the muscle tissue all the way through, no matter the size of the batch.
The Right Flights
The size, length, and pitch of these flights ensure the meat continuously moves and never rests until the massaging/marinating cycle ends.
In the end, every piece of product—ham, for example—stays consistently chewable, with improved industrial slice yield. Hams processed with a tumbler lose more product in slicers because of the inconsistent muscle texture and firmness. Blades end up crushing or “chewing up” more of the product, and producing excess unusable slices.
In the end, Meat-on-Meat Massage™ technology delivers enhanced tenderization, decreased loss, and improved yield from raw meat to sliced product.
Add Vacuum for Optimized Flavor
You can also apply vacuum in your massager/marinater. This expands the muscles for improved marinade and brine penetration.
The massaging action reaches the core of the muscles, where it activates intracellular protein for molecular-level water binding. This combination of negative pressure and massaging achieves thorough and even flavor enhancement and batch yield.
You win, your quality wins, and your client’s consumers win with juiciness, bite quality, and overall product experience.
Your Batch Is Our Business
Challenge RMF meat marinating technology provides consistent and uniform results—no matter the batch size. We offer several different choices of drum size for your operational needs.
The impressive array of Challenge RMF meat massager/marinater models let you choose the right capacity for your plant:
| MODEL | MM-1 | MM-2 | MM-3 | MM-4 | MM-6 | MM-7 | MM-10 |
| Capacity (lbs) | 2500 | 5000 | 8000 | 10,000 | 12,000 | 15,000 | 22,000 |
| Capacity (㎡) | 45.4 | 90.8 | 145.4 | 181.8 | 218.2 | 272.7 | 400 |
Every model allows you to process that maximum size batch—and every batch size under it. Our team will partner with you to find the right model that gives you the process line flexibility you need.
Make a Lasting Choice
The first massager sold by Challenge RMF still does its job in a plant in Nebraska. We’re not talking “years” of service, we’re talking decades. With the improved quality of meat product, along with reduced product loss compared to tumblers, choosing Challenge RMF means investing in generations of excellence.
Prolonged performance must be built into your commercial meat massager. Though other companies may see “planned obsolescence” as a parts and repairs revenue stream, the Challenge RMF team designs and builds every piece of equipment with long-term reliability at the core.
Our founder didn’t want us to offer anything but the best. To this day, we hold that as our priority. Just ask our clients: they respect our vacuum massager/marinater reliability so much that we have a 92% customer retention rate. That doesn’t happen by accident—it happens by proof.
The Details Matter, Including Cleaning
From our MM-1 model up to our MM-10, we engineered ease into the use, including the cleaning cycle.
Step 1: Rinsing the Residue
After discharging the last load of the day, your crew can rinse the residue off the inside of the massager as it slowly rotates. You’ll need water that’s 95℉ to 105℉, and you can control the speed of the rotation to match your needs.
When you’re ready, discharge the dirty rinse water and exudate. After this procedure, the drum can stand for up to 4 hours before the cleaning step.
Step 2: Cleaning the Drum
The CLEAN mode of operation provides automated cleansing of the drum. To start the process, your team adds hot water to the drum at a temperature between 155℉ to 160℉. They should also add a small amount of non-foaming detergent, and when they finish correctly filling the drum, they close the vacuum door.
To start the cycle, they access the repeat cycle timer and select a pre-programmed recipe. Because Challenge RMF designs our equipment for flexibility, your team can also choose to enter recipe times as desired. The drum’s automated cleaning cycle begins, rigorously agitating the solution in the drum while the vacuum holds the door closed.
The negative pressure also kills germs as the cycle runs. Finally, you empty the cleaning solutions and fully rinse the drum again.
Step 3: Let It Dry
Once you finish cleaning your Challenge RMF massager/marinater, it can dry or immediately start your new batches! You can also save your custom programs for future use based on the batches you’ve processed.
Clean, easy, and time-saving—that’s quality craftsmanship designed around your processing needs, and yet another big difference between a commercial meat massager and tumbling equipment.
Get the Best in Batch Excellence
Any way you slice it, choosing the right commercial meat massager for your production facility requires a long-term investment in your business, your brand, and your client’s satisfaction. With so much riding on the line, don’t settle for “second best.”
Select a partner that improves your industrial food processing chain, providing you with the best customer service and equipment performance, along with another key ingredient: choice.
Contact us or call our team, and let Challenge RMF show you why the original creators of Meat-on-Meat Massage™ technology remain the leaders in performance, service, and best of all—results.
About Us
Challenge RMF expertise combines advanced engineering with real-world experience—so you receive dependable solutions.
For over 45 years, we’ve designed and built commercial massager/marinaters, vacuum loaders, dumpers, cryogenic marinating technology, and more for meat processors.
From brand-new equipment to replacement parts and repair service, we’re there when you want us and here when you need us. Come explore what’s possible with Challenge RMF.
