For Tomorrow’s Grocery Industry: Our Work on Meatless Products
At M&M Equipment Corp., we have been helping customers to improve their business processes with good industrial equipment solutions since 1991. That’s quite a while ago, and things have changed a lot since then.
One of the biggest changes that we’ve seen across the board is a move away from meat and red meat products to new kinds of food products featuring non-meat ingredients like soy, pea proteins or other vegetable-based staples that can be used to fashion new kinds of food healthier for us, and healthier for our world.
The Meatless Revolution
About a decade or so ago, pressure on the meat industry was already building. People were starting to hear about more egregious factory farming practices where animal conditions became less and less humane. For example, instead of roaming henyards or pastures, chickens were being confined to terribly small boxes and living tortured lives before serving as food for the average household.
We also started to hear more about the health benefits of limiting red meats – from lower levels of fat in the diet, to protection against certain kinds of cancers. The “Mediterranean diet” taught us to re-evaluate how we eat.
Healthy Eating and Smart Processing
At the same time, we started to hear more about the dangers of processed foods.
Processed meat products are right in the crosshairs of these types of scientific investigations. Combining the red meat itself with the preservatives and processes used to keep it shelf stable are proving to be quite harmful to human health on the average.
At the same time, processing can be an entirely appropriate process for natural foods that can still help us to stay healthier and avoid unsustainable factory farmed meats. Largely, it seems that the processing itself, or the reformulation or re-shaping of food, isn’t the problem: it’s the ingredients, the waxes and colorings and everything else.
With this in mind, a good meatless production process requires different kinds of grinders, formers, packing gear, and other equipment that are put into service to work on developing natural plant-based patties or nuggets, or thin sliced products, or anything else that can stand in for red meat at the dinner table or in a packed lunch.
At M&M Equipment, we’re proud to be in the vanguard of this type of food engineering. We’ve worked with some of the biggest brands in non-meat proteins over the last 15 years to develop real solutions for the store and the table. You’ll see our collaborative impact in your neighborhood stores as companies jump on the bandwagon to offer more sustainable, more humane and healthier buying options. Take a look at our website to see all of the gear that we provide to help companies innovate in these key ways and adapt to market realities.