Ready meal depositing solutions

• Use case: sauces, with or without pieces, and béchamel into ready meal trays, for chilled and frozen meals.
• Typical tasks: a layer across the tray, sauce in one chosen compartment, or one layer after another.
• What you gain: a clean sealing rim, the portion per tray set in the recipe, and less giveaway.
• Not a fit: solid toppings such as grated cheese, and pasta sheets. Those go in with other equipment.

FoodJet deposits liquid foodstuffs into the open tray, smooth or with pieces. Typical products include:

• Meat sauces and bolognese-style sauces with pieces of meat and vegetables
• Béchamel and other white sauces
• Tomato, pasta and BBQ sauces

Not sure if your sauce fits? Send it to us, and we test it on your own trays.

A tray only seals well when the rim is clean. Sauce on the rim weakens the seal, and the tray goes back for wiping or is rejected. A filler with a few wide nozzles drops the sauce in spots, even near the rim, so someone spreads it and wipes the edge before the lid goes on.

The depositing head is a row of individually controlled nozzles. The nozzles above the rim stay closed, so the sauce goes across the tray and stops at the free edge. That edge keeps the width you set, all the way round, and you decide how close to the rim the sauce goes. The tray goes on to the sealer without wiping.

A servo-driven pump feeds the depositing head, and the volume is digitally controlled to the portion in your recipe. You set the portion per dish in the recipe. Each nozzle opens only above a tray, so the sauce you pay for ends up in your trays. You buy less sauce, and your line needs less cleaning.

In a tray with compartments, the recipe sets which compartments get sauce and how much. One depositor fills the compartments the recipe picks. With several depositors one after the other, each compartment can be filled on its own, with its own sauce.

A layered dish is built from above, one open layer at a time, and each layer has its own depositor: meat sauce, then béchamel, then meat sauce again on the next layer. On a lasagne line, one central ring main, a single supply pipe, can feed all the stations that deposit the same sauce, and each station fills its own layer. Pasta sheets and grated cheese go in with other equipment between the stations.

Meatsauce in ready meal trays

The nozzles are wide enough for pieces of meat and vegetables, and spread the sauce and the chunks across the tray instead of dropping them in one spot. At a ready meal producer in the US, a FoodJet depositor puts chunky sauce across lasagne trays and keeps the rims clean for sealing. Results depend on the recipe, the chunk size and the tray format. Béchamel goes on as its own layer, often in a separate step after the meat sauce. We confirm in a trial, with your own sauce, whether your sauce and chunk size run well.

Chunky sauce depositor for lasagna and ready meals

Trays never sit in exactly the same place. When your trays run in a fixed position, a sensor detects each tray, so a gap in the line gets no sauce. When trays shift or rotate, vision measures the position and rotation of every tray, and the pattern follows it. With vision, a tray outside the limits you set gets no sauce either, and its status is passed on to your line, so your reject system knows which tray to take out.

Check and reject products out of specification

A new tray size, compartment layout, pattern or portion is a recipe in the FoodJet Control Platform, the software that runs the depositor, not new tooling. You load the recipe for the next SKU, and the depositing heads work on the moving conveyor, so the line keeps running.

• Tray size, shape and compartments
• Dishes and layers: which sauce goes in which compartment or layer
• Sauce type, and the size of the pieces
• Portion per tray, and line speed
• Sealing method, chilled or frozen

Send us your tray size and compartments, your dishes and layers, your sauces and the size of the pieces, the portion per tray and your line speed. We test it with your own product. After the trial, we advise on the setup for your line and send you a proposal.