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.
Why Our Massagers Get Confused With Tumblers
Our vacuum Meat-on-Meat Massage™ technology often gets confused with vacuum meat tumblers because some manufacturers erroneously equate the two systems. We go over the differences in-depth in our “Infusing Flavor With a Vacuum Meat Marinater/Massager” blog.
Here are highlights of why a vacuum tumbler doesn’t equal a meat massager:
- Straight Flights. Meat tumblers generally use long, straight flights instead of gentler, helical flights.
Hydraulic Shock. Meat tumblers use “hydraulic shock” to tenderize. This drops meat a distance to cause impact damage to meat fibers.
Extra Wear. Hydraulic shock causes extra stress to the straight flights in vacuum tumblers, weakening their welds.
Lower Yield. Vacuum tumblers (not massagers) can disintegrate connective tissues, destroying the meat’s muscle structure and diminishing moisture binding capacity for lower yield.
Meat Consistency. A vacuum tumbler’s effect on muscle tissue also reduces the meat integrity, downgrading the quality/bite of the meat.
Lower Tenderization. Hydraulic shock emulsifies a muscle’s outer portions, delivering no tenderization to the core.
Massagers Mean Better Meat
Challenge RMF originated Meat-on-Meat Massage™ technology to provide superior meat processing for our clients and the best products for their customers.
Meat-on-Meat Massage™ in a Challenge RMF vacuum massager (vacuum tumbler) moves, folds, and massages the meat via our custom-designed helical flights. As the rolling action created by these flights continues, it carefully tenderizes the muscle tissue all the way through.
The size, length, and pitch of these flights ensure the muscles continuously move and never rest until the vacuum massaging/marinating cycle ends. The massaging action reaches the core of the muscles, where it activates intracellular protein for molecular-level water binding. This increases your yield—and the juiciness of your customers’ products.
Built Better to Last Longer
The precision construction and custom design of each vacuum massager deliver a perfect fit for your processing system. The materials we use for our equipment ensure longevity for decades of dependable performance.
- Drums constructed of 5mm to 7mm-thick plate stainless steel.
- All seams at the circumference of the drum are submerged-arc welded.
- Drum track made from a 50mm x 75mm stainless steel bar.
- Drum opening reinforced with 25mm x 50mm stainless steel bar.
- Drum opening further reinforced with 6mm x 125 mm band welded to the discharge cone.
The protective water-ring vacuum pump can handle meat and brine contaminants that would otherwise interrupt production.
We improve performance and reduce maintenance needs through stepless hydrostatic power and a rugged, zero-slip gear reducer with heavy-duty bearings. Your productivity quotas and your plant staff won’t have to worry about greasy, noisy chains and sprockets requiring downtime to clean and maintain.
How Meat-on-Meat Massaging Works
There are vacuum tumblers and vacuum massagers, but only one true Meat-on-Meat Massage™ massager. Our proprietary technology imparts dynamic action to meat muscles, tenderizing all the way to the core of the muscle while bringing proteins forward—all without degradation.
Because our gentler meat-on-meat massage keeps muscle fibers intact, it increases yield while reducing cost by eliminating expensive added ingredients to achieve targeted yields.
Meat-on-Meat Massage™ (instead of delivering damaging hydraulic shocks inside a vacuum tumbler) stretches and presses connective tissue fibers. As these fibers lose their elasticity, the meat becomes more and more tender.
You can set the amount of time for massaging so that you achieve the perfect tenderization while still keeping the tissue functional as a product.
Add Vacuum for Increased Yield
Challenge RMF vacuum massagers lower the pressure inside the drum to your preset level. This pressure change causes tissue to expand. When at the top of the load, they expand the most. As the helical flights gently roll the meat toward the bottom of the drum, the weight of the meat on top compresses the fibers.
It’s almost like breathing, pulling in more marinade or brine solution with each decompression (inhale), and forcing the marinade/brine deeper and more evenly into the full muscle tissue with each compression (exhale).
When water retention is improved, it maintains meat tenderness and improves your yield. For your customers, the product becomes delicate, tender, and wholesome without the damage or emulsification associated with vacuum tumblers. The wholesomeness of the muscle is preserved because the tissue matrix is not ruptured, burst, or emulsified.
As a bonus, the negative vacuum pressure can improve quality and safety of the product by reducing bacteria and material oxidation.
What Our Vacuum Massager Does for Your Product
Our proprietary Meat-on-Meat Massage™ technology delivers profitability and quality benefits for all kinds of meat, excelling far beyond the capabilities of vacuum tumblers.
Beef
Red muscle fiber absorbs water more effectively. If you place a fresh piece of meat into water, brine, or marinade, it naturally absorbs a certain amount of the liquid.
When you combine this innate quality of the tissue with the action and vacuum provided in a Challenge RMF design, yield increases as the muscle itself is tenderized. You won’t get the mushy exterior and un-tenderized interior that vacuum tumblers often cause.
Instead, Meat-on-Meat Massage™ enhances the meat texture, imparting greater pleasure to the bite feel, along with juicier, more flavorful meat.
Pork
When using a Challenge RMF vacuum massager with pork, you’ll discover that the improved flavor penetration creates a more uniform spread of seasoning through the fibers.
The mechanical action also makes the pork more tender, from steaks to tenderloins. With the enhanced retention of water, marinade, or brine, profitability can be increased through both product yield and customer retention.
Poultry
Our Challenge RMF vacuum massagers work gently, reducing or eliminating opportunity for broken wingtips and breastbones, or torn skin—thus reducing loss. Even distribution of ingredients and seasonings means improved taste, mouth-feel and bite.
The combination of vacuum and mechanical action significantly speeds up the marination process. What might take several hours or overnight in traditional marination can be achieved in a much shorter time, making the process more efficient. Also, bone-in/skin-on breasts, leg quarters, and wings achieve yield increases up to and exceeding 10% to 20%.
For boneless breast and thigh meat, clients achieve up to and exceeding 35% added yield without injection, and up to and exceeding 60% added yield with injection of approximately 30%.
Poultry has a higher pH, increasing the meat’s potential for spoilage over that of both pork and beef. The controlled environment of the vacuum massager can help reduce the risk of contamination, and the improved speed lowers the chance of spoilage during processing.
Seafood
It surprises many of our clients when they find out that Challenge RMF Meat-on-Meat Massage™ technology can handle their seafood meat processing.
This is because regular vacuum tumblers use hydraulic shock to lift and drop the meat, causing fiber damage and external emulsification. Seafood tends to be a much more fragile meat product, and it cannot survive that action in vacuum tumblers.
With a Challenge RMF vacuum massager, the gentle rolling action and the customizable speed of the rotation allow you to fully control the action inside the drum. Filets, shrimp, and more can achieve higher yields and a more even distribution of flavor and seasoning additions with minimal loss or damage.
3 Powerful Additions to Your Food Processing Machinery
Challenge RMF, we custom design and manufacture food processing solutions that do what you need—and do it better.
Vacuum Loading System
Our vacuum loading system allows for fast, straight-through loading into your meat-on-meat vacuum massager drum. These custom-engineered designs deliver:
- Accurate measurement of all ingredients.
- Zero drip loss.
- Use for multiple massagers.
You’ll speed up processing while minimizing loss, with consistent product quality.
Massager/Marinater Dumper
The LD24 Massager/Marinater Dumper from Challenge RMF helps processors complete their tasks more efficiently and reliably. It can be customized to fit your containers for versatility within your system. Our massager/marinater dumper offers:
- Heavy-duty stainless steel construction.
- Spillage-stopping spout design.
- One cylinder lifting and tilting.
- Pallet drop feature that keeps pallets from being over product.
We design and fabricate each piece of equipment to deliver lower maintenance requirements, improved cleanliness, and excellent performance.
Microwave Thawing System
To thaw frozen meat before insertion into your Challenge RMF vacuum massager, producers turn to the Challenge RMF microwave thawing system.
Our system uses both steam and microwave energy to thaw frozen raw materials without causing hot spots. Utilizing a custom-built drum containing specific helical flights, the frozen meat moves through the drum during the thawing process, ensuring consistent thawing.
Our microwave thawing system offers:
- Virtually no product degradation.
- Heavy-duty stainless steel construction.
- Precision automatic drum seam welds to facilitate easy cleaning and sanitation.
- Custom solutions come with total design flexibility, including the widest range of drum sizes on the market.
Long-lasting, durable, and customizable, the Challenge RMF microwave thawing system meets needs and exceeds expectations (ask about the cooking ability).
Rise to the Challenge
We’ll put our vacuum massager up against vacuum tumblers any day. Proven data and happy clients can attest to the superior product quality and profitability delivered by Challenge RMF.
Contact us today, and let’s set up a time to thoroughly discuss your project and your needs. Our team can deliver spec’ed-out ideas that maximize quality for your customers and profitability for your bottom line. We can even bring equipment to your site for testing. Call us at 816.765.4101, and let’s talk turkey. Or chicken… pork… beef… etc.
About Challenge RMF
For over 35 years, our company has been here for manufacturers and processors. You don’t stay in business that long without excellent product backed by equally excellent service.
Challenge RMF clients can reach our engineers and product specialists via phone, over email, and on-site. We’ve helped process the world over, customizing and installing a vast number of products in an equally diverse number of production situations.
We’re there when you want us, and here when you need us.
