AMPC: Red meat bone belt automated monitoring solution

Opportunity for

• Imagery solutions providers or developers seeking financial support to demonstrate and evolve your offering in red meat monitoring on bone belts to measure and manage red meat discharging on the bone belt to acceptable levels

Opportunity description

Industry challenge: Meat processing is a capital, labour and energy intense industry. Processors are looking for many incremental improvements in the cost of production or efficiency gains from technology that improves the meat yield per carcass.

As boning room efficiencies do not change how much livestock has been purchased for, loss in maximum saleable yield from the boning room has a direct effect on realising maximum possible $ sold to the market. Hence improving boning room red meat recovery on the highest value cut possible adds directly to the bottom line of a P&L.

In the boning stage of processing a bovine (or ovine) carcass, any ‘free’ meat or bones with excess meat remaining on them is typically sold as rendered product at a nominal value of $AUD 0.50/kg. The next highest meat offering is trim, which can demand up to $AUD 5.00kg. So, recovering bone belt red meat as trim (in an AQIS approved way) can lift the value of the red meat 10 fold.

Improving accuracy in the boning process and awareness of how much meat has been left on the bone can provide valuable data on boning process performance of staff and operators.

Current opportunity: AMPC would like to hear from providers who believe that they could develop either an over the belt, or in belt system, that can accurately quantify how much red meat (both free and attached to bones) is being discharged along a bone belt, in both bovine (primary focus) and ovine operations.

The first step will be the proof of detector concept with the demonstration of the accurate quantification of red meat on the belt. Further evolutions could incorporate reporting to boning room staff and red meat harvesting value-added modules. Hence, this is probably a 2-5 year development program.

See the 'Theme on a page' for guidance around the proposed stages of development for this innovation. Further information, including details of past R&D, is available in this pre-populated research proposal which potential providers are invited to complete after consulting with AMPC.