Suped-Up Pasta Cooking And Pouch Cooling Line At 21st Century Foods Helps Make Fresh, Ready-To-Eat Entrées A Big Hit With Retailers

21st Century Foods of San Antonio, Texas, a manufacturer of fresh, fully-cooked and ready-to-eat entrees for retail and institutional markets, is one food processor that is in a whirlwind of production activity. The company, which started operation in 2004 with a patented process for re-constituting and re-texturing de-boned chicken meat, and gross product shipped for that first year approximating .75 million pounds, is now providing its entrees to such mega-retailers as Albertsons and Target, with a projected 7.0 million pounds of product to be shipped in 2006. Not bad a start for a company that is new to the fresh-food, ready-to-eat entrée market. But, how does this start-up manage to maintain such a rigorous production output with a fresh product line-up? One crucial factor is the completely state-of-the-art cooking and cooling processes that they are using, and particularly their pouch cooling set-up, all of which was designed and built by food processing equipment developer, Lyco Manufacturing.

The trend toward fresh, fully-cooked and ready-to-eat entrees has been steadily building with consumers in the United States. Picking up an entree that is both fresh and healthy from the deli department of a supermarket for example, putting it in the microwave and having a ready-prepared meal for the family in a few minutes is just a convenience too hard to resist. According to InfoScan, a retail foods information researcher, Hormel Foods, Tyson Foods, ConAgra Foods and other fresh entrée producers are registering annual double-digit dollar and unit volume gains in this category.

21st Century Foods' line of fully-cooked, fresh entrees produced under their Total-Meals and Redi-Quick brands for retail sales include Stroganoff, Chicken Lasagna Casserole, Enchilada Casserole, Chicken Italian Sausage with Red Sauce and Penne Pasta, Chile Pie, Cheesy Taco Mac and others. The company also produces a line of fresh, fully-cooked meat sauces such as Chili con Queso, Taco Filling and Sloppy Joe. Currently they are supplying Super-Target and Albertsons, and stores up the eastern U.S. coast, the mid-west, Texas and parts of California, Minnesota and Michigan. For institutional markets, such as schools and correctional facilities, the company has been marketing a broad line of fully cooked breakfast sausages and hamburger patties. 21st Century Foods retrofitted an existing food production plant into a 26,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art processing facility where they handle all of their production and distribution.

"The convenience and health aspects are what we have focused on," says Robert Stanzel, Vice President of Engineering for 21st Century Foods. "We felt a fully-cooked, fresh product would pay a dividend to the consumer above a frozen product, and that fits in very well with the entrees we are producing. All of our products are made primarily with chicken, they have very little saturated fat or trans-fatty acids."

"Our dinners are 32 ounces - basically one meal for a small family," continues Stanzel. "With a price point about $5.50, our meals are very reasonable. Plus, the quality of our fresh entrees, both from the standpoint of taste and appearance, we believe gives us an edge with consumers. Our entrees have about a 70-day shelf life due to the way we process our products and the way we package them. This is highly desirable for retailers."

The production process that 21st Century Foods uses to produce their fresh entrees is quite different from the norm. The meat that is prepared for their Total-Meals and Redi-Quick branded entrees - primarily de-boned and re-textured chicken - is sauced, spiced, bagged, cooked and cooled. On another production line, they bring in raw pasta, or raw rice, and cook it, cool it and bag it. Then package it with the companion bag of meat sauce and it is ready to ship. This is unusual, as most companies that make prepared meals will pre-cook their pasta and then add the sauce to it in one pouch. Using individual pouches helps to maintain the just-cooked shape and consistency of the pasta or rice. The consumer, then, microwaves them in their separate pouches, puts them together in the microwaveable tray, stirs, and has a ready-to-eat meal.

An obstacle on the line that had to be surmounted was with the processing of the flexible pouches containing the meat sauces. The pouches leave the hot-fill machine sealed, before they are then conveyed to the pouch cooler. The size of the pouches being used for the company's fresh meat sauces is relatively small - approximately 1.4 pounds in size - compared to more typical 6-pound to 8-pound pouches of sauce. This makes the handling of the pouches a significantly more delicate operation. The pouches couldn't have any damages or wrinkles because they are packaged for consumers in a tray - they had to maintain high pouch integrity.

For the engineering of the pouch cooling, 21st Century Foods turned to Lyco Manufacturing, a pioneer and market leader in the development of equipment for the heating, pasteurization and cooling of flexible pouches. Lyco's patented pouch cooler is arguably the most efficient system on the market - primarily because it continually and gently agitates each pouch throughout the cooling process, producing a consistent mix of the sauce throughout the pouch, eliminating hot spots.

The Lyco pouch cooler installed at 21st Century Foods is a 72" diameter x 28' rotary drum cylinder – the pouches are fed into the machine by a belt conveyor. The pouches are then augured through the cylinder, totally submersed in water, and gently stirred and massaged. Once through the machine, first-in and first-out, the product is then gently deposited on a belt conveyor or discharged out through a chute for packaging.

"The pouches are filled at approximately 170 degrees, and need to be brought down to below 40 degrees while in the pouch cooler," says Chris Ewert with Lyco. "Food handling regulations require that the cooling procedure take place within four hours for a sealed pouch. The Lyco pouch cooler can bring the temperature of the pouches to below 40 degrees in 60 - 90 minutes, making it the fastest pouch cooler made - 30 percent faster and 15 percent cooler than conventional belt systems."

For the pasta cooking and cooling, 21st Century Foods opted for another Lyco-patented design - a totally state-of-the-art, integrated system including the metering infeed, the cooking, the cooling, the discharge conveyors, and system controls package. The cooker-cooler itself is unique in the industry because it can cook and cool all in the same machine. It is a 60" diameter x 8' cooker and 4' cooler rotary drum cylinder set-up.

"The pasta comes to the plant in combos - cardboard containers that sit on pallets," continues Ewert. "The unit is set up to run both pasta and rice. The combos are then dumped into the infeed hopper with a fixed combo pivot dumper. The hopper feeds the pasta into a vibratory conveyor equipped with a weight system that meters the pasta into a bucket conveyor, which then feeds it into the cooker cylinder by a water cushioned in-feed flume. The pasta is cooked, then transferred into the cool zone cylinder to be cooled to the desired final temperature. The cooking and cooling processes are a seamless flow, transferring the pasta from the one to the other within the same unit. When the cooked and cooled pasta comes out, it is fed into another vibratory conveyor that dewaters the pasta, and then into a lift conveyor that feeds their bagging machine."

When 21st Century Foods first got under way setting up their plant, they had a tremendous understanding of their proprietary chicken de-boning and re-texturing processes, but they had little knowledge of the cooking and cooling procedures for pouches, pasta and rice. Now, just a few years after starting, with the systems developed and put in place by Lyco, they have a showpiece processing facility for cooking and cooling pouches, pasta and rice, and they are carving out a strong position in one of the fastest growing sectors of the prepared-foods market.

SOURCE: 21st Century Foods