The Ready-to-Eat (RTE) meal is designed to save time for the modern working-class individual and family. These prepackaged meals can be consumed on the go, on the job, or on the couch. As modern life grows increasingly busy, the demand for RTE foods continues to rise. This is great news for food producers and marketers in this industry—for those who have the right food filling machine to get the job done right. On the other hand, if your food depositor tends to leave meals looking unappetizing, your consumers will take flight. Years ago, when the ready-made meal industry was just beginning to take off, consumers had higher levels of excitement and lower expectations – but that’s no longer the case. Today’s consumers expect RTE foods to deliver on a number of fronts, including these key parameters:

• Taste: the meal should taste about as good as a home-cooked one
• Freshness: the packaging must be well-sealed to remain fresh in cold storage
• Sanitation: the meal must be safe to eat without further processing
• Nutrition: the ingredients should be low in salt, sugar, calories, and chemicals
• Aesthetics: the meal should look presentable without further processing

Market demand dictates that food manufacturers must invest in specialized equipment that can rapidly package fresh, tasty, and nutritious meals without compromising on sanitation or aesthetics. Simply “boiling” the ingredients and “dumping” them into containers isn’t going to get the job done anymore. Food manufacturers looking to gain the competitive edge in the modern RTE food market will need to go above and beyond basic consumer expectations. In a Packaging Strategies Q&A, Natalie Schmid (Product Market Manager at Multivac) said the shrinking, aging baby boomer demographic and the growing millennial demographic are changing market demand
in important ways:

• Sustainability: consumers want less packaging in order to be more eco-friendly
• Portion size: consumers want the option of smaller portions or individual portions as opposed to family packs
• Convenience: consumers want easy-to-open and re-closable packages
  
  

Multi-Fill’s MPFSC-120 Automatic Pocket Filler is the best choice for ready-to-eat meals. It can keep each part of a packaged meal separate while sustaining a rapid output. Other advantages include:

• Capable of filling up to 120 containers per minute. It can dispense accurate portions for a wide variety of products, including cooked rice and pasta, couscous and quinoa, fruits and vegetables, etc.
• Compatible with a wide variety of container conveying systems. Food manufacturers can use it to fill trays, plates, cartons, cups, pouches, cans, jars, boxes, etc.

To increase productivity, this rapid food filler features a color screen for controlling operations. The filling head, which can be taken apart without tools for easy cleaning or inspection, is built with stainless steel or food grade plastic parts to meet the food sanitation standards of ANSI, FDA, USDA, and CE. If you’re striving to deliver a positive customer experience in every bite, contact us today to learn more about our food filling machines and food depositors. Call us at 801-280-1570 or reach us online.