Cutting food products

At a time when food products are increasingly presented to consumers pre-sliced for ease of use, mastering slicing and cutting operations remains a delicate issue for many products: soft, chewy, sticky, crumbly or heterogeneous. In response, new cutting techniques are being developed in a world where the knife remains the most common tool.

Although almost all sectors of the agri-food industry use cutting operations, there is considerable heterogeneity in the use and function fulfilled by these operations. The meat industry (where the bulk of added value is generated by cutting operations) and the dairy products industry (which require very different types of cutting, given the varied textures and shapes of the products) remain the sectors that make the greatest use of cutting tools.

In this article, we will only deal with cutting, which leads to dimensional reduction by controlling the geometry and weight of the finished product. Grinding, whose aim is also to achieve dimensional reduction, but on a small scale with uncontrolled breaking trajectories, as well as chopping and grating, which also lead to the creation of small-sized objects whose geometry is more or less under control, will not be covered.

The first part of this article summarizes the important concepts required to understand the operation of the cutting equipment most commonly used in the food industry. The second part details various tools and techniques: blades and saws, ultrasound and hyperbaric water jets, and presents a few applications of these cutting technologies.