High-performance ovens helping processors create prepared food perfection

The world’s leading food processors seek to create great taste — consistently — while also achieving high yields, at the largest capacity. They measure their success by flavour, efficiency, improvement, innovation, and of course — profitability.

An industrial high-performance oven must deliver all of the above, and more. So let’s take a look inside some of the most innovative solutions – being used to create prepared food perfection — on processing lines around the world.

Multi-purpose oven

An industrial multi-purpose oven is — as the name suggests — multi-purpose. A wide range of ready-to-eat products and ‘prepared foods’ are cooked in this type of oven. Food processors choose a multi-purpose oven for their operation when their aim is to achieve repeatable, high-quality products, and high-yields.

The MPO Cooking System^® is a great example of a multi-purpose oven used by prepared food processors of seafood, poultry, pork, filled products, vegetables, baked foods and meat alternative products. This innovative oven uses a unique cooking process to preserve more of the product’s original moisture content and flavor.

The MPO is designed to precisely control the interaction between cooking temperature and moisture — to achieve rapid heat transfer without dehydration — while developing the ideal surface texture and maintaining valuable yield.

An optional menu-driven PLC control system can be used to recall the appropriate parameters for each product, which facilitates efficient changeovers and the ability to cook a variety of products quickly and efficiently. The ability to establish, then save the settings for temperature, moisture, and cooking time on this oven is what helps it achieve the repeatable, consistent quality of production, this industry workhorse is known for.

Spiral oven

Industrial spiral cooking has many advantages and is a preferred continuous cooking system for many processors of ready-to-eat products. Meat, seafood, poultry, vegetables, meat alternative products, bakery items, breakfast cereal, and even dehydrated fruit and vegetables can all be cooked in a spiral oven.

Available factory space often determines which oven is chosen. The space-saving Spiral oven uses 360-degree airflow, is engineered for high volume, and to cook a variety of products. Food processors who want to partially, or fully cook their product — or dehydrate it prior to further downstream processing — choose a spiral oven. Some also use it to develop and enhance the colour of their products, and it is well suited to products that require a long dwell time.

The Spiral Oven from Heat and Control is built for continuous uniform cooking across all tiers: for faster cooking, higher yields, and increased production output. It’s versatile in its ability to use dry heat, steam only, or combination heat. It’s available in single or twin drum configurations, and is custom built to suit the unique product requirements being processed.

Impingement oven

A genuine impingement oven is the industry standard for processors of par-and-fully cooked ready-to-eat meats. This style of oven is used to cook meat, seafood, poultry, prepared foods, breaded/battered foods, baked foods, pet food and meat alternative products.

A true impingement oven uses high velocity airflow above and below the belt — distributed evenly across the width of the belt — and along the length of the oven. The AirForce^® Impingement Oven cooks dramatically faster than comparable ovens and is used by processors aiming to cook their products rapidly to achieve high production output.

This oven has been proven to deliver faster cooking and greater uniformity than any other impingement oven and does so — through use of technology to quickly and evenly transfer heat — across the full width of the product conveyor. This is a unique process which helps preserve the foods flavour and moisture, and produces higher yields.

AirFry system

This high-performance, industrial linear air frying solution released in early 2022, was developed to help processers of prepared foods take advantage of the growing air fried foods market. The AirFry^® system brings together technologies to create air fried/oven fried products with taste, texture, and appearance that is like fried foods — without using traditional (submersion) frying methods.

It's a new solution for the industrial, high performance oven category, that is ready to help the prepared foods industry explore new recipes for traditional favorites. It will give processors the means to continuously produce ‘fried-like’ products using a controlled application of topical oil, followed by the uniform flow of pressurized, high velocity cooking atmosphere from an impingement oven.

Ideal applications for this system are breaded products (non-free-flowing flour, free-flowing crumb and Japanese crumb, chicken breasts, strips, nuggets, and other boneless chicken pieces, breaded seafood and vegetables, breaded cheese sticks and non-breaded products.

The AirFry uses the uniform, high speed air frying of the AirForce Impingement Oven — and highly accurate Spray Dynamics® oil application equipment — to provide complete and uniform coverage of products, while keeping oil use at an absolute minimum.

This system will help processors expand and diversify their product range and is also an innovative way to manage the rising cost of oil, and reliability of its supply.