Precise Portion Control: Takeaway vs. Positive Scales in Food Manufacturing

With shrinking margins, increased raw material costs, and laborers abandoning their nine-to-five jobs for roles in the gig economy, food manufacturers have to squeeze every ounce of value from each batch of material they process.

The techniques used to weigh and measure portions for convenience foods (or just selecting the right weight of costly proteins in ready meals), will have a drastic impact on your bottom line. With consumer demand for convenience meals continuing to grow year-on-year, improving the processing speed, accuracy, and consistency of each packaged product is how high-performing food manufacturing organizations set themselves apart from their competitors.

The secret sauce in this recipe for success is often the weighing equipment they deploy on their packing lines. Integrated, intelligent weighing solutions are how they limit giveaway, maintain labor productivity, and demonstrate compliance with their customers’ technical specifications. To illustrate this, below we discuss the differences between positive and takeaway scales in the food manufacturing industry.

What Are Positive Scales?

Many organizations still use positive scales to portion their ingredients. These standard scales are common in home kitchens, restaurants, takeaway establishments, and food processing facilities. Depending on the model, it may be an analog or digital system but the key characteristic is they provide laborers with a positive weight measurement of the material on the scale pan.

To portion a meal, employees on the assembly line place the ingredient on the scale pan and adjust the amount of material until it displays the right weight. Once they achieve the target weight, the worker places the portion onto the meal tray and restarts the process for the next container.

Organizations that use this technology face several issues:

• Time - Portioning the right amount of ingredients takes longer as line workers are picking up, placing, then adjusting the portion before transferring it to the final container.
• Accuracy – Although the scale provides accurate measurements, the size of the portion may vary considerably from one container to the next when laborers attempt to increase speed and start compromising their accuracy.
• Traceability – Using primitive scales without any data collection provides almost no insight into a laborer’s performance or the amount of overpack or giveaway for each container they processed.

Basic, positive scale weighing can increase your dependency on skilled labor, result in unaccountable losses, and limit your ability to control yield throughout the processing operation.  Although positive weighing can be beneficial for certain products and processes and is sometimes the best solution for certain food processing operations. However Takeaway Scales may be a better solution for your operation.

How Takeaway Scales Help Improve Your Bottom-Line

Takeaway scales inform workers how much material to remove from a bulk container to achieve the target portion weight. By setting the portion weight the scale can quickly calculate when the laborer removes the required amount of material, allowing them to place accurate portions consistently on each product tray.

By removing the positive weighing step, laborers can speed up their portioning tasks while remaining accurate. A color-coded 16 segment traffic light display provides immediate feedback to the operator. When a scale operative achieves a green light, they know that they have the required portion weight to deposit into the meal.

Takeaway scales improve portioning tasks by:

• Indicating the exact portion weight to deposit into the meal
• Deskilling the production line by using a simple but effective ‘traffic light’ indication of when too much or too little material is in the portion
• Connecting the entire line with software modules that track yield, maintain laborer control, and provide exact data about the line’s processing performance

With MARCO’s takeaway scales, food manufacturers can be fast, accurate, and cost-effective when portioning RTE meals or convenience foods.

Some of MARCO’s easy-to-implement solutions that improve operator and management efficiency include:

• CheckMaster Takeaway Scales - A fit for purpose takeaway scale that comes with the traffic light technology to indicate the precise amount of material required per portion on the production line.
• Positive Scales/Workstations – A fit for purpose stainless steel benchtop scale or workstation with integrated positive scale using the same traffic light technology to indicate the precise amount of ingredient required to portion onto the production line.
• Yield Control Module - A software module that optimizes operator efficiency, improves product consistency and delivers maximum ingredient yield whilst helping management keep track of all line operators performance and all weighing transactions. Yield Control Module can be linked to both MARCO Takeaway and positive scales described above.

Let MARCO Demonstrate Our Precise Portioning Solutions and Help Claw Back Your Overpack Percentages

MARCO’s solutions can help manufacturers reduce skilled labor dependency in packing and processing operations by up to 50%. This allows organizations to redeploy staff and increase their overall processing efficiencies. By using better tools to support management and operations, you can claw back your overpack rates to within 1% of material volumes. MARCO’s productivity tools are modular and can integrate with your wider business systems, allowing you to gain complete traceability and insight into your food manufacturing process.

To see how you can increase the speed, accuracy, and traceability of your food portioning lines, request a demonstration from MARCO today.