FSI Shear Pump Fixes Mix and Eliminates Downtime

Since the early 2000’s, marinated meat products have become more popular and prevalent in meat cases everywhere. Their popularity has risen not only because marinated meats are tender, moist and flavorful, but they come to the consumer ready to cook.

One method of marinating meat is injection marination. Which is just as it sounds: meats are injected with salt and seasoning marinades. The desired result is a flavorful, juicy, consistent tasting meat product.

Recently, a large global food corporation was experiencing problems with its meat marinade injection skid system due to seasoning particles in their marinade clogging its injectors. The problem stemmed from how they made their marinade. They would add approximately 1 gallon of salt and seasonings to 4 gallons of water in a 5-gallon tank and mix it with a Lightnin wand-style in-tank mixer. This method would disperse the salt and seasoning particles, but not sufficiently reduce their size and the too large particles ultimately would clog the injectors.

When this happened, their system would need to be shut down and cleaned out, causing unacceptable production time loss and maintenance expense. As a result, the engineering firm they worked with turned to Fristam for ideas, who quickly recommended that instead of replacing the entire mixing tank set-up, they simply place a Fristam FSI Shear Pump inline between the mix tank and the injector system.

Fristam recommended an FSI 712 Shear Pump for the application. The FSI is able to create enough shear to reduce ingredient particle size due to its intermeshed rotor/stator system that disperses ingredients into liquid. The rotating teeth on its rotor passes closely within the stationary teeth on its stator at high speeds, causing a tremendous amount of turbulence. As centrifugal force pushes the mixture towards the outlet, the intensity of this turbulence ensures that all product must be thoroughly blended to exit the FSI. Additionally, the FSI Shear Pump has an impeller built into the rotor that provides extra pumping action.

Once installed the FSI 712 Shear Pump was able to reduce the particle size of the salt and seasonings enough that they no longer clogged the injection system. By eliminating the need to stop and unclog the injectors during every batch, the FSI saves this processor an estimated 4 hours of downtime a day, 28 hours a week or 1,460 hours a year. Contact Fristam for more information on how the FSI can improve your uptime and “Fix Your Mix.”