How to Achieve 30% Increased Productivity for Your Ready-To-Eat Assembly Line

Ready-To-Eat (RTE) meals aren’t new, but the variety of products available is growing rapidly. Consumers are placing greater emphasis on convenience as they grapple with busier lifestyles, but still want to maintain healthy and nutritional diets. Almost every aisle in our supermarkets now stock some form of RTE product, from the deli counters through to the fruit stands and meat sections. 

A survey from Piplsay found that almost half of Americans had ordered cook-and-eat and heat-to-eat meals in 2021 from services like HelloFresh. Blue Apron processed around 6.6 million orders in 2022 alone.

As far back as 2016, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that American households spent about 50% of their food budgets on convenience items, while RTE meals and snacks made up 26% of that amount. Jump back to today and the market is expanding drastically with manufacturers starting to deploy RTE vending machines, demonstrating how convenience foods are a top priority.

Obviously, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as consumers won’t readily sacrifice quality for the sake of convenience. Manufacturers have to balance the cost, quality, and value of their products if they want to maintain profit margins and capitalize on growing demand. Achieving a 30% increase in productivity is possible by deploying the right RTE assembly line technologies. Below we look at how you can gain these additional efficiencies using MARCO solutions.  

Increasing Productivity by 30% with Smarter RTE Processing and Packing Operations

Production lines for RTE meals often rely on manual processes. Laborers have to assemble the meal by selecting the right amount of each ingredient before placing it in the container. If it includes certain products like proteins, the portions have to reach the exact minimum weight as per the nutritional value printed on the label.

This approach presents three main challenges to manufacturers:

• Speed – Different workers may operate at different levels of efficiency, causing bottlenecks on the line.
• Consistency – To maintain the required line speed, workers may be picking up bigger portions than necessary and increasing the amount of giveaway.
• Traceability – By not tracking each batch of goods and every laborer’s performance, you cannot see where you are losing product, wasting time, or causing bottlenecks.

The productivity of the portioning and packing processes often sets the pace for the entire manufacturing facility. Portioning ingredients is also the biggest source of your unaccountable losses due to inconsistent handling between different workers.

In RTE applications, using a takeaway solution will increase the production speed 95% of the time. To uncover where your inefficiencies are, using MARCO software modules, we measure your current processes and identify areas where we can help you boost productivity by up to 30%, and limit your overpack to less than 2.5%. Here’s how.

How to Control, Measure, and Optimize Your Packing Productivity

MARCO software provides complete production line intelligence enabling you to make changes to increase processing speeds. Reducing the dependency of skilled laborers on your production lines allows you to increase production, enabling you to meet the demand of a growing consumer base. 

With takeaway scales, laborers can operate accurately while maintaining the required speeds. The line’s indexing capacity depends on how quickly a worker can select a portion of ingredients, adjust to the correct weight, and place it on the meal tray.

A takeaway system instantly provides two major benefits:

1. Workers only handle the portion once, taking ingredients away from a bulk tote or bin and delivering them directly to the meal tray.
2. Traffic light scales tell operators when they’ve taken too much or too little product from the takeaway tote, eliminating the need for them to make decisions and deskilling the packing lines.

Another benefit is that you can connect the scale to MARCO’s Yield Control Module. This software gathers precise data on every weight packed and shows you where you are consistently going over the required tolerances.

The software modules are configured with the technical weight specifications and can be switched easily when one product type finishes and another has to begin limiting downtime during changeovers. The workstations and scales are IP69K / NEMA 4X rated to withstand harsh washdowns. 

MARCO can also optimize the scales to accommodate for environmental variables such as air conditioning, and uneven flooring which may influence the accuracy of each weighing procedure.

By controlling the weights to within the maximum allowable variation (MAV) at one customer’s production facility, MARCO saved a company more than $500,000 per year of giveaway just on bacon portions.

To see more of our success stories, you can browse through some of our recent case studies here.

Control Your Profit Margins with Productivity Solutions from MARCO

MARCO enhances productivity by improving your factory floor’s efficiency. We help RTE manufacturers to reduce giveaway with tighter control over each portion, without having to sacrifice the speed of the line. Because our scales and traffic light systems are language-agnostic, any worker can perform their tasks confidently and your organization can ensure you operate within tighter tolerances, while meeting your customers’ technical specifications.

MARCO would be happy to demonstrate the potential gains available to you when switching to our software and hardware solutions.

Contact us today to speak to a productivity expert.