Your company wants to generate maximum revenue through your meat processing. Your customers want maximum flavor and mouth-feel from the meat products they purchase. Challenge RMF delivers on both ends, with our Challenge RMF Vacuum Marinater/Massager.
This amazing cornerstone component of food processing equipment delivers uniform, dependable results for superior product quality and profitability.
Contact us today, and let’s talk about your company’s goals for tenderizing and marinating meat. The Challenge RMF team has decades of experience targeting the right equipment for food processing facilities. From custom-designed and built equipment to installation and startup, we get to the meat of the matter: your success.
Read on to understand the tech—and the value—behind a vacuum marinater for your meat processing business.
First, a Word About This Word: Tumbler
What is a “massage tumbler”? Some companies claim it’s the same as a meat massager.
Simply put: that’s bologna. A meat massager differs from a tumbler on a number of key points, no matter if you try to call the process “massage tumbling,” “vacuum tumbling,” or “tumbler marinating.”
What is a meat tumbler?
A meat tumbler is a machine, usually with a barrel rotating on a horizontal axis, that tumbles meat inside of it. Most have long, straight flights that, as the barrel rotates, lift the meat and drop it down—relying on hydraulic shock to tenderize. This hydraulic shock can cause damage to the muscle fibers themselves, and the tumbler flight welds weaken quickly.
Our unique Meat-on-Meat Massage™ technology uses helical flights to move, fold, and massage the meat without hydraulic shock. This careful rolling action tenderizes the product and activates intracellular protein for molecular level water binding.
Tumbling Beats Up Meat Products
In meat processing, the tumbler’s action batters and beats connective tissue fibers. This treatment can disintegrate those connective tissues, destroying the muscle’s structure and diminishing its ability to bind with moisture. Structure loss causes the muscle to lose its shape and integrity, leaving an amorphous pulp.
The hydraulic shock of tumbling often creates a pulpy texture on the muscle surface to a depth of .25” to .5” into the muscle. While tumbling emulsifies a muscle’s outer portions, the muscle core receives no tenderization.
It’s important to have consistent texture throughout the muscle. If you’ve ever sliced a piece of cooked meat and parts seem to shred under the blade while you must saw through other areas, it’s likely been tumbled.
Inconsistent texture also limits moisture absorption capacity, reducing flavor profile, “juiciness” of the meat, and your profitability.
Meat Massagers Work Gently
You can set your Challenge RMF Meat Massager to the desired length of massaging time, drum angle, vacuum level, and more to achieve the best quality and most profitable results. Even finer cuts of meat can be massaged without worry of damage to these higher-cost products.
Meat Tumblers Mean Less Absorption
Tumbled (not massaged) muscle tissue will often absorb high quantities of moisture in that sticky, emulsified surface area. However, the process won’t deliver enough moisture to the muscle core, causing uneven and poor-quality results.
During the tumbling process, this wet and mushy surface area will rub off, creating a slushy soup of fractured meat fibers and water. Meanwhile, the muscle core has not absorbed sufficient moisture.
Any moisture that has been absorbed into the muscle largely becomes free liquid, deposited in pockets between fibers and fiber bundles. Since this free liquid hasn’t bonded to protein, it will purge after 1 to 2 weeks in the vacuum bag at the retail level or in storage.
This also causes pronounced shrinkage during the cooking process, which means unsatisfied purchasers and lower sales.
What a Vacuum Marinater/Massager Does
With a Challenge RMF Vacuum Marinater, you’re achieving all the benefits of a true meat massager, including:
- Full muscle tenderization.
- No damage to muscle surface.
- Muscle fibers remain intact for product integrity.
- Improved marinade/brine retention.
- Cold temperature control.
- Increased bite quality.
- Noticeable eating tenderness.
How We Do It
The technology developed by Challenge RMF accomplishes all of this by vigorously but nondestructively massaging the meat. The movement inside the drum makes muscle rub against muscle, while simultaneously compressing and relaxing the muscle tissue.
This action stretches and presses the connective tissue fibers until they lose their elasticity, becoming tender yet still functional. Our proprietary design arranges the helical flights in the barrel so that the muscles continuously move and never rest until the vacuum massaging/marinating cycle ends.
Why Vacuum Helps During the Massaging Process
As pressure is lowered via the vacuum suction, the meat tissues expand. When they travel along the bottom of the drum, the weight of the meat on top of them compresses the fibers. This squeezing and expanding pulls in more marinade and spreads it more evenly within the fibers.
Red muscle fiber naturally tends to absorb water. A fresh piece of meat placed into water, brine, or marinade absorbs a certain quantity. However, it will absorb more if its connective tissue has been loosened and relaxed (tenderized) through the massaging process. When water retention is improved, it maintains meat tenderness and improves the yield for the meat processor.
Tenderness Confirmed
At this point, the tissue becomes delicate and tender. The wholesomeness of the muscle is preserved because the tissue matrix is not ruptured, burst, or emulsified.
The negative vacuum pressure in the Challenger RMF drum can also reduce bacteria and material oxidation for higher-quality and safer results.
Furthermore, products exhibit higher protein activation within a shorter period of time, so better product yields can thus be achieved. The increased slice firmness of the product can be measured by a higher slice yield. By binding fewer spatial and temporal resources, massage technology can achieve the highest possible profitability.
Meat-On-Meat Massage™
Our Meat-on-Meat Massage™ technology activates muscle deep down with gentle massage that avoids product damage while delivering maximum protein exudation and water binding. Keeping muscle fibers intact increases yield while reducing cost. It eliminates the need for expensive added ingredients which are otherwise required to achieve targeted yields.
Longer-Lasting Equipment
We have crafted all Challenge RMF designs, including our vacuum marinaters/massagers, for superior performance with a long working life.
The helical flights not only create the Meat-on-Meat Massage™ action, they reinforce the drum’s structural integrity. This combines with the thickness and integrity of the stainless steel drum for outstanding equipment longevity.
As a matter of fact, the first massager we ever sold still operates in a plant in Nebraska! That’s nearly 4 decades of use. While other companies may scoff at us for refusing to create “built-in obsolescence,” our clients love our vacuum marinater/massager reliability so much that we have an 87% customer retention rate.
We Have Parts Ready to Go
Should something happen and you need a replacement part or repair, just reach out to our parts department or give us a call. We stock important wear items so we can get you equipped and back running again as fast as possible.
Part of the reason for this availability is that our models rarely change. Honestly, they don’t need to—they perform with excellence. This means parts are readily available for almost any Challenge RMF Vacuum Marinater/Massager, no matter the age.
Custom Engineering for Your Facility
No two businesses are the same. That’s why we custom-design food processing solutions, manufacturing them to the client’s exact requirements and specifications. We have the expertise in engineering, design, and manufacturing to create reliable, customized food processing equipment that will last for years—and even decades—to come.
- RMF Steel: systems to create and move your products.
- Challenge RMF: meat massagers, loaders, and more to process the products.
- RMF Freezers: custom-made, dependable freezing and chilling equipment.
We’ve sold/installed over 11,750 pieces of RMF equipment in 47 countries and counting. We can do the same for you.
It’s Time to Meat Your Goals
What started as RMF Steel 8 decades ago has expanded into engineering, development, and manufacturing of equipment solutions for food processors around the globe. Got a project in mind? Contact us and let’s talk about what you’re trying to accomplish. We bring great ideas to the (dinner) table.
There is no other manufacturer that delivers the same kind of quality, unique, and efficient massagers and marinaters that both maximize your yield and your return on investment.
About Challenge RMF
The Challenge RMF Vacuum Marinater/Massager system builds upon a well-proven body of knowledge. It contributes the old-fashioned element of vigorous but gentle meat massaging—but through modern means.
The customers at barbecues, dinner tables, restaurants, and more love the food quality. The food processors providing these products love the control, reliability, and profitability.
We love custom-designing equipment and building relationships. Contact us today.
