Kraft Foods Global Brands LLC

Kraft Foods Holdings, Inc.

Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC

Randy Glynn

Paul Edward Doll

Timothy J Drebing

Timothy T Watson

Peter V Doll

Gary Skaar

Mark E Malenke

Muluken Tilahun

Mark Ervin Malenke

Amy Lynn Nehls

Lynda Cabrales

Sarah C Humke

Matthew A Hurm

Edward A Kusmider

Carrie K Giannettino

Methods and apparatus are disclosed for producing irregular pieces of meat from meat products. Further, a method of mass-producing a home-style meat product with an irregular appearance includes combining whole muscle meat with a mixture having a low-phosphate solution and/or a low-salt solution and cooking the combination to produce whole muscle meat logs. Once the whole muscle meat has been cooked, the meat may be pulled, shredded, or sliced on a variety of pulling, shredding, and slicing equipment to create a home-style meat product with an irregular appearance.

Home-style meat product and method of producing same

A system and method are provided that allow meat logs to be manually loaded into a slicing station and thereafter be continuously automatically processed at the slicing station, a harping station, and an insertion station for automated packaging thereof without the need for handling of the meat stacks by workers. To this end, the slicing station is effective to form smaller sections or chubs from the meat logs and to do so such that the chubs are provided with substantially parallel flat end-faces to ensure that high quality meat slices are generated therefrom. The chubs are then transported to the harping station where each of the chubs undergoes a single cutting operation, thus simultaneously forming the meat slices therefrom and substantially maintaining the slices in the configuration of the chubs for generating well-formed stacks of the slices. Thereafter, the stacks are received at the insertion station where they are transferred to their packages, on an automated basis without the need for manual handling thereof. This is enabled due to the well-formed stacks generated by the harping station which allows the stacks to be dropped into the packages aligned therebelow.

Automated method for placing sliced food stacks in packages

Growing community of inventors

Fall River, WI, United States of America

Randy Glynn