V-Cut 300: Marel’s new flagship in portion-control cutting

More than ever, cutting fresh meat for ready-to-cook portions is a vital process for traditional handcraft butcheries and the global meat industry supplying retail and foodservice. The highly comprehensive portfolio means that Marel experts can consult with customers to determine the portion cutting solution that is truly ideal for their individual needs.

With the acquisitions of MAJA and TREIF, global leader Marel unites three industry-leading portion cutting brands to help processors respond efficiently to changing customer demands and market trends. With the most extensive meat cutting portfolio on the market, Marel’s solutions help transform fresh meat into high-value uniform portions of fixed weight, thickness and uniform shape.

The V-Cut 300 PortionCutter joins the portfolio 

Launching at IFFA in May 2022, the V-Cut 300 PortionCutter is the new flagship in Marel’s wide-scale range of volumetric weight-controlled portion cutters. It meets the requirements of medium to high volume meat processors focusing on retail and foodservice, offering the highest possible degree of flexibility paired with increased yield and unbeatable portion quality. The new portion cutter delivers outstanding flexibility and can cut odd-shaped primals to uniformly shaped, equalized portions.

Prime steak producers can truly level up with the V-Cut 300. The machine perfectly compensates for the size variance of the beef cuts so that uniform steaks can be produced as required for retail and foodservice. The V-Cut 300 offers a cutting solution that guarantees equal portions of the same weight, thickness and shape, even from odd-shaped primals from pork, beef and turkey. Portioned like this, the products are ready for automatic loading in trays so that the processor can save manual processes.

The V-Cut 300 also performs well when prime steaks are packed on sustainable paperboards for trendy presentation. Then it is advantageous that each portion has the same dimensions, a factor that not all portioning systems can achieve.

Unique portioning mold offers key advantages

The V-Cut 300‘s innovative, adaptable portioning unit applies lateral pressure to the cut during the cutting process, allowing not only uniformity of portion shapes but also better yield and reduced giveaway. Further, the side-press function makes it possible to handle different meat sizes in the same mold shape. This means there is no downtime to reconfigure the machine when changing raw material, which saves an enormous amount of time and increases throughput.

Another strong advantage is the extremely operator-friendly raw material loading and ergonomic working process enabled by the low infeed height.

Superb flexibility and variety

With a very large operational window, the V-Cut 300 can cut a wide variety of products and offers flexibility when portioning fresh crust-frozen, boneless primals into fixed weight portions with a uniform shape. Slices for schnitzels, prime steaks, minute steaks, very thin slices of 2 mm, cubes/dices, and butterfly portions, and even bone-in pork chops can be cut into equal portions with the V-Cut 300.

Slices can come out as single portions and as pre-formatted shingled or stacked batches, ready for manual or automatic tray loading.

To produce portions with fixed weight or fixed thickness and a uniform shape, the processor can choose between two cutting modes: “fixed-weight,” meaning each portion has the same accurate weight, or “best-yield,” meaning that each primal is fully utilized and cut into portions with a similar weight, but the same thickness.