Waterjet Cutting Food
For decades, water jets have been used as a manufacturing process to cut variety types of food cutting, including pizza, cakes, romaine lettuce, celery, meats, frozen fish, bacon, sandwiches, pettit fours, candy bars, granola bars and all types of frozen food. Pure water cutting up to 90,000 PSI/6,200 bar offers the greatest added value by cutting produce, meats, bakery, and confection products in a sanitary environment without the cross contamination found in blade cutting systems.
According to Food Production Daily Magazine, “waterjet technology is one of the fastest growing major machine tool processes in the world due to its versatility and ease of operation.” The use of pure water in waterjet cutting systems capable of cutting at incredible speeds up to Mach 3, has received USDA approval for creating a bacteria free hygienic cutting process method.
Waterjet Advantages over Mechanical Blades from KMT Customers:
Food Safety
1. Reduced particulates on the blade which requires maintenance and significant QC.
2. Reduced product mulching or build up in the system mechanisms which requires shutdown and cleaning in mechanical systems, often disassembly to some degree.
3. Reduced zone 1 swabs for QC; generally looking for listeria. Zone 1 is any direct food contact surfaces and any pathogens found in this zone will contaminate the product. Facilities are required to regularly swab these and monitor the results and are audited at random. Big labor cost.
Performance1. Waterjet flexibility – we can cut strips, diced, etc in many sizes and we think our system can be designed such that it can be configured to run various produce and fruit products.
2. Fewer spares and lower spares cost. Blades alone cost $50-60k/yr, not including the other maintenance around food safety, etc. WJ is about $15k.
3. Less labor
4. Higher throughput
The biggest advantage of waterjet cutting is the time savings using pure water as a food cutting solution. Since no knife blades are ever used, there is no downtime changing out or sharpening dull blades. Bakeries have literally doubled their yield cutting cakes with waterjet compared to using knives.
A diamond orifice is used to maximize the waterjet cutting life, typically the size of the stream is a width of a human hair at speeds up to 3,000 feet (914 m) per second. This small kerf width is so thin that food will not be compressed or washed out.
For perfect portion control and improved shelf life for food products, KMT Waterjet is the solution.
Meet Our Food Cutting OEMs