Cutting up your carrots, courgettes and cucumbers

Stelram’s engineers investigated the customer’s requirements, but accurately slicing carrots is no easy task. If conventional blades are used, these must be kept very sharp as the pressure needed to cut with a blunt blade can damage the carrots, making them unsaleable. The blades must also be kept immaculately clean to achieve the exceptional standards of hygiene that are essential in the food industry.  

And there’s also the potential issue of cross contamination – if a damaged or diseased carrots find their way into the slicing machine, the residues left on the blades could contaminate subsequent vegetables, which means they must be discarded – at considerable loss for the food processor.

The Stelram engineers, had a better solution – water-jet cutting, where the vegetables are sliced with nothing but a fine jet of high-pressure water projected from a nozzle. This solution has many benefits, not the least of which is that the water jet is sterile so that there is no risk of contaminating the product, or of cross contamination. In addition, there are no blades to clean and sharpen. The safety hazards unavoidably associated with sharp blades are also eliminated.

The finished machine is configured for manual loading and unloading. After loading, the machine’s infeed conveyor transports the vegetables to the cutting station where they are cut and trimmed by two water-jet cutters operating in tandem. The outfeed conveyor then transports the resulting slices or pieces to the unloading station.

The machine dependably produces carrot slices of the required thickness with smooth, cleanly cut surfaces and no product damage. The design of the machine eliminates the risk of contamination and ensures that cleaning, which is minimal, is easy to carry out.

Further, by processing two vegetables simultaneously, the machine achieves the high throughput needed by the end user. A further benefit is that the machine can be quickly reconfigured for use with a wide range of other vegetables, including aubergines, courgettes, and cucumbers.

Stelram’s engineers may not have quite achieved the food-industry equivalent of the alchemist’s dream of transmuting lead into gold, but transforming everyday vegetables into delicious, ready to use chunks that have a long use by date - must surely come close.