GEA and Red Arrow scoop innovation award

The highly regarded meat technology award for meat processing was presented on the final day of Germany’s trade show IFFA, which concluded a fortnight ago. The award honours innovation in the meat and sausage processing chain, with GEA and Red Arrow picking up the gold award in the smoke and climate control category.

GEA and Red Arrow have co-developed a technology called SuperHeatSmoke, an in-line solution that smokes meat products without actually producing smoke. It is integrated into GEA’s CookStar double spiral oven – a third-generation machine GEA has been manufacturing for over quarter of a century.

Healthy meat ​

Now, creating smoked meat products without smoke seems like something of a paradox, but the technology could help meat processors create healthier smoked products, claimed the companies.

“Food processors get more and more direction from local and central government to provide sustainable products and adopt a responsible eating policy,​” said Paul Verbruggen, senior product manager of further processing at GEA. “The SuperHeatSmoke in-line smoking process, co-developed with Red Arrow, produces fully-cooked smoked products that meet these criteria.​”

Uwe Vogel, managing director at Red Arrow, added that the atomisation technology in the GEA CookStar provided an “efficient, safe and effective alternative for hot smoking processes​”.

This is because the smoked products are created without harmful residues like tar, ash or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH). As such, products smoked with the GEA CookStar can be labelled as ‘clean’ and may be healthier than alternatively-smoked products, the two companies claimed.

In addition to the health aspects that helped the GEA-Red Arrow win the award, the in-line smoking process cuts the normal time it takes to smoke a product from hours down to minutes.