Deciding to start a prepared meal business or expanding your existing business is an exciting venture. Starting and expanding a prepared meals business requires choosing the best equipment for success. But what factors do you need to consider when looking for the right prepared meals equipment?
Here, we’ll detail a couple of important factors to consider when looking for the right equipment for your prepared meals business. We’ll also explore how automated machinery benefits any food assembly production line, especially automated machinery available at Quantum Technical Services. Lastly, we’ll briefly focus on how automation makes bulk packaging easier. Let’s start with important factors to consider when buying prepared meals equipment.
Important Factors for Prepared Meals Equipment
When looking for equipment for your prepared meals business, it’s important to consider production capacity, factory space, intended menu, maintenance, ease of use, and planning for the future. Thinking about these factors will benefit your business in both the short and long-term. These factors serve as a great stepping stone for starting and/or expanding your prepared meals business and can also future-proof your business!
Production Capacity
Production capacity is one of the most important factors to consider. How many meals does your company intend to assemble per day? If your company would like to start producing or increasing production to thousands of products per day, automated machinery is your best bet. Automated equipment not only allows companies to produce thousands of meals a day, but it does so quickly and accurately. Meeting production quotas is critical in meeting demand and getting your product on shelves. Automated equipment from Quantum Technical Services makes high production capacity possible for prepared meals businesses.
Factory Space
Knowing your available factory space helps your company plan for the types of equipment that can work efficiently in the space provided. Assembly lines work well for high production only if the right machines can fit on the factory floor. While a great deal of food assembly equipment is bulky and requires a large amount of working space, the automated prepared meals equipment at Quantum Technical Services is space efficient and easily rearrangeable to meet changes in demand and operations.
Menu
Another factor to consider when you’re looking for the perfect equipment is the menu of products your company would like to make. Different types of ingredients may require different types of equipment. Knowing which ingredients your company will be handling can help you narrow down which equipment will be needed. We’ll explore which prepared meal equipment we have available at Quantum. It’s important to note that most of our machines have many ingredient applications. As long as the ingredients fit in the machinery and the equipment can properly dispense them, you can use many different types of ingredients to diversify your product selection!
Maintenance and Ease of Use
To keep your production line running smoothly, you’ll also have to consider ease of maintenance for your company’s equipment. Ease of use and simple maintenance is necessary for your equipment because it decreases downtime and allows your employees to fix issues ASAP. Running a business is already complicated – why opt for complicated equipment? At Quantum, our equipment is very user-friendly and easily maintained in order to simplify operations and maximize productivity.
Planning for the Future
Lastly, it’s important to plan for the future of your business as you’re choosing equipment for your new or expanding company. Keeping the future of your business in mind can help you select the right equipment. While your company may be set on current product menus and production capacity, the present shouldn’t prevent growth in the future. Automated food equipment allows easy scalability. Our equipment at Quantum can adapt to demands as your business grows.
Production capacity, factory space, menu, maintenance, ease of use, and planning for the future are all important factors to consider when your company is looking for food equipment. At Quantum, we can help solve each of these challenges with our automated machinery. Our automated equipment is designed specifically to simplify the prepared food production process.
Automated Machinery for Prepared Meal Businesses
Our team at Quantum is the leading source of automated food equipment, including sauce applicators, meat and pepperoni slicers, cheese and topping applicators, and dry and granular ingredient applicators, which are all ideal for prepared meal preparation. Quantum machinery provides any prepared meals business with ingredient flexibility and scalability to meet demand and changing business needs.
Sauce Applicators
We offer both waterfall and targeted sauce applicators, which work great with red sauce, gravies, and other sauces. Waterfall sauce applicators ensure even sauce dispensing on your products and reclaim capabilities to conserve and reuse unused sauce to save resources. Targeted applicators dispense a certain amount of sauce per product, which saves overhead ingredient costs. Our Quantum Technical ServicesA Series Targeted Sauce Applicators are particularly well suited for dispensing sauce onto sandwiches and French Bread products.
Meat and Pepperoni Slicers
Our meat and pepperoni slicers can slice and apply cylindrical/stick meats including pepperoni, Canadian bacon, and sausage. Quantum meat slicers can also be used for slicing cylindrical/stick deli-style meats and cheeses for added versatility. Using machinery that has many applications can centralize food production assembly and reduce operating costs.
Cheese/Topping Applicators
Quantum waterfall and target cheese/topping applicators can dispense a number of different ingredients onto your products, such as shredded cheese, vegetables, and IQF ingredients. These applicators are versatile, which can allow your company to create different types of products to stand out from the competition. Automating your production line, especially your topping applications, increases quality and consistency.
Dry and Granular Ingredient Applicators
Lastly, dry and granular ingredient applicators are important pieces of equipment necessary for a prepared meals business. Dry/granular ingredient applicators help companies further diversify their product lines because they can dispense so many different kinds of ingredients. These dry and granular ingredients include herbs, spices, seeds, granulated cheeses, and dried veggies. Our dry/granular ingredient applicators are easily implemented into existing assembly lines to seamlessly improve recipe possibilities and adaptability.
So far, we’ve reviewed important factors to consider as you’re searching for the right food assembly equipment and how our selection of automated prepared meals equipment can meet these business requirements. Now, let’s briefly focus on another food industry challenge – bulk packaging – and how automation can help solve this issue.
Spotlight: Bulk Packaging and Automation
Bulk packaging is always a challenge in the food industry. Since efficiency is the key to more product packaging, which means more product gets shipped, how do you reach optimized efficiency? At Quantum, we believe it’s automation.
Unless a product is perfectly assembled, packaging products can come with challenges associated with efficient storage, transportation, and handling. Companies need their products to survive freezing, transportation, and shelf-life. Often the root cause of not surviving these challenges is improper assembly, which causes issues down the line, especially during bulk packaging. Messy and improperly-assembled products can affect storage strategies and lead to situations where products don’t survive transportation and shelf-life. A simple answer to this conundrum is employing automation during the assembly process because it drastically increases consistency and quality. Automation ultimately results in successful packaging. Let our team at Quantum Technical Services help your business prepare your products for a successful lifespan, from conveyor to customer.
Automating Your Prepared Meals Business With Quantum Technical Services
At Quantum, we believe in efficient automated food production equipment that is easy to use and maintain. We offer a number of automated prepared meals equipment solutions that simplify and streamline production lines. Be sure to contact us today to find out how we can transform your prepared meals business!