RE N L AW
MEAT YOUR MAKER In today’s highly competitive market, meat processing plants tend to have the same aims - cutting costs and increasing profits are obviously important, but so is reducing waste, improving efficiency and boosting quality.
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t can be tricky to try to achieve all of these objectives simultaneously, and many companies find themselves struggling to figure out which of these aspects to prioritise. Every now and then however, you come across something that can help producers to accomplish numerous goals simultaneously while reducing cost and improving product quality. A great example of this is a welldesigned industrial machine blade. To find out a little more about how machine knives are evolving to meet processors’ needs, Meat Review caught up with Mikko Brunner, MD of Renlaw – a Cape-Town based machine knife manufacturer and Africa’s leading supplier of industrial cutting tools.
Renlaw blades are made from the best German toolsteels
Over the last three decades, Renlaw’s industrial blade business has grown to support many industries, but their main focus is on food processing and packaging. The majority of Renlaw’s customers are in the protein market, but they also provide solutions for readymeals, fruits and vegetables, snacks and confections. WHAT IS THE TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP? “It is human nature to be drawn to consumables that are well-priced, but that can be very short-sighted,” Brunner points out. “It really does pay to think long-term, especially in industries such as food processing where you’re hoping to get a long sharp-life out of tools.” He goes on to explain that once blades stop performing well, the operational
costs can add up very quickly. “When the cut isn’t clean anymore, your scrap rate increases. You also end up needing to do more frequent blade cleaning because of increased product build-up. Add up the labour costs and the cost of production loss during stoppages due to blade cleaning and blade changes, as well as the cost of new, replacement blades, and you’ll find that choosing cheap blades over quality blades can really affect a company’s bottom line.” Renlaw manufactures only exportquality blades that make consistent, high-quality cuts and have a long ‘sharplife’, or lifespan. While blades may cost a little more than cheap imports from the East, the total cost of ownership is considerably lower. Brunner provides a simple way to make purchasing decisions based on ISSUE 5 2021
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