LEAP4Beef DEXA cut information translation using carcase marking and verify proposed cutting and processing methods are suitable for TEYS production

Summary

​An ongoing boning room project between the processing company Teys Australia and MLA is creating a prototype beef automation system (boning room) based on the success of lamb boning automation and DEXA enabled beef rib scribing automation.

This current project generated and verified different red meat cutting technologies, cut paths and cut sequences to assist the Teys Australia automatic beef boning room project.

Cutting technology, methods and pathways have now been established for an automatic bone-in cutting system to enable automation of the beef primal separation process.

Objectives

The project objective was to manually replicate new automated cutting technologies and methodologies to verify if products can be integrated back into Teys Australia's production and meet the company's customer requirements and specifications.

Key findings

• This project proposed cutting pathways for automated beef boning processes that can increase the value of the carcase.
• The proposed cuts would create intermediate portions suitable for Teys Australia's production and the proposed sequence of cuts is the most likely solution to assist the boning room project.
• The cutting strategy generated in this project is tailored to automation and is unlikely to be of benefit for manual boning processors.

Benefits to industry

The results of this project create the opportunity to increase the value of cuts and adjoining portions of meat by more accurate cutting.

MLA action

Three other ongoing MLA projects (P.PSH.1200; P.PSH.1204; P.PSH.0893), are being established to mitigate the risk of knowledge gaps to ensure that the $30M investment for the beef boning automation (P.PIP.0772) project has the most successful outcome.

Future research

As the results of this project are based on very small product samples sizes, it is recommended that multiple products are processed using this cut strategy to determine its application on a larger scale.