Upon arrival, guests are introduced to a 2.5 million-dollar, 25,000-square-foot kitchen dedicated to high-volume, high-speed, food processing. Entry begins with a true “clean room” experience, with hygienic architectural products such as stainless steel curbing, hands-free sinks, and stainless steel floor drains.

“Test kitchens should be set up to resemble a high-quality food factory,” explains Howard. “Here, you walk in, change into your smock and boots, and put on a hair net. Then proceed through a hand wash station. There’s also a sanitizer to scrub and wash your boots.”

The food processing area itself contains $8 million worth of fully operational production machines and product handling equipment that can continuously feed as many as 10 different cooking processes. Think: steaming, blanching, broiling, baking, searing, branding, grilling, and pasteurizing; convection impingement to infrared; with gas, electric or thermal oil. Cooking temps range from below boiling point all the way to 1,600° F.

Specific pieces of equipment include a flame broiler/griller with a series of eight ribbon burners to speed the browning and searing of foods such as mushrooms. In the case of poultry, the searing process seals in the natural oils before entering an oven. The oven, itself, incorporates a 16” wide belt that spirals around the burners to the equivalent of 150’ of belt, all within an 8’ x 8’ footprint.

No kitchen, test or otherwise, would be complete without a gas infrared oven, the most innovative of which utilize a stainless steel burner head for increased durability.

Likewise, quick cooling “crusters” have attained de rigueur status for any food-processing plant that produces meat or poultry logs. Round out the chilling side of the business with a spiral freezer and a continuous impingement freezer. With the inclusion of an infrared or Aquaflow pasteurizer, almost every imaginable aspect of the food processing industry gets covered in today’s modern kitchen.

If that’s not enough, Unitherm’s kitchen, for one, comes staffed with design engineers willing to work hand-in-hand with food processors to modify any existing machinery into a customized cooking system. An on-site 3-D modeling system speeds the process.

• Setup can be fully customized
• Test specific machines or across process lines
• Web casting capability for remote viewing of test
• Design engineers and onsite 3D modeling speed solutions

Contact us for an appointment with our Innovation Kitchen.