Providing customers with alternative food delivery styles such as in-restaurant dining, takeout, heat & eat dishes, and at-home meal kits offer various food manufacturing businesses and brands diverse opportunities. This flexibility has shown to be particularly valuable to businesses and customers alike during the volatility of a global pandemic. Customers are demanding high-quality foods and convenient meals they can carryout or cook and eat themselves. When analyzing the market for heat & eat and meal kits, food manufacturers can meet and exceed the market’s need by mass-producing delicious products with industrial sous vide equipment.
Heat & Eat Meals
Heat & eat meals are fully cooked ready-to-eat meals prepared quickly and conveniently at home. Consumers have the flexibility to choose the components of their meals, from the protein to the sides. These meals are created in mass and distributed to restaurants and markets. These meals are designed to be convenient, ready-to-cook, and make both meal preparation and cleanup quick and easy.
Meal Kits
More than just heat and eat, these meal kits require varying degrees of preparation, from complex to minimal. In recent years home delivery meal kits have grown in popularity, with people who enjoy cooking and having the ingredients directly at their fingertips. Meal kits typically come with recipes and a mixture of cooked and uncooked products so the consumer can still have the at-home chef experience. Meal kits can be ordered and sent directly to the home, and recently, restaurants and markets have begun providing them.
Industrial Sous Vide Cooking Equipment For Mass Production
From the traditional dining-in experience to the growing takeout economy, consumers will continue to purchase and eat food products that are delicious, fresh, nutritious, and convenient. When purchasing heat & eat or meal kits, creating a delicious and consistent product for customers is easy to accomplish using industrial sous vide equipment. With industrial sous vide equipment, you can produce large quantities of perfectly cooked, seasoned, and portioned proteins for both meal kits and heat & eat dishes. Additional reasons to use industrial sous vide equipment for this type of meal preparation are:
- Cost savings
- Consistent cooking results
- Improved nutrition
- Increased product safety
- Easy to store or transport
Using industrial sous vide equipment to meet the increasing demand for meal kits and heat & eat dishes is a great way to deliver consistent, high-quality products that can be cooked, cooled, stored, and rethermalized in the same packaging. Today’s customer demands their at-home food to be high quality, nutritious and convenient. Using industrial sous vide equipment allows for global food producers to answer this demand safely and efficiently. Products can even be left to cook unattended, overnight with guaranteed results.
Learn More About the Industrial Sous Vide Cook Tanks Available from DC Norris
Industrial sous vide machines offer industrial food producers unprecedented control over finished product quality. The sous vide cooking technique slow-cooks food in vacuum-sealed plastic pouches submerged in a precisely controlled water bath. The food is consistently cooked and can be easily stored or transported for use in meal kits or heat & eat meals at any location. Available in various industrial cook tank sizes capable of producing from 600lbs to 1,900lbs of precisely cooked product, DC Norris can design, manufacture and install the latest in industrial sous vide cooking and cooling equipment.
