Mechanical membrane skinning technology from the very beginning until today

What’s ‘membrane skinning’ ?

The removal of the membrane and all connected sinews from the meat surface is called ‘membrane skinning’. On the photo you can see cuts from the leg before and after mechanical membrane skinning: During the past 40 years, membrane skinners have conquered butcheries and industrial meat processing plants – with success!

Membrane skinning – why??

The recent year’s structural changes have completely changed consumer lifestyles. The results: different eating habits and new shopping behavior. The constantly decreasing family size and the increasing number of single households have a big influence on the demand.
Families get smaller and smaller, single person households are quite normal and frequent, nowadays. This fact has a decisive influence on the eating habits. The big fatty meat cut, which needs hours to cook, with a certain experience of the housewife, is no longer appreciated. A lot of working ‘amateur cooks’ are not interested in spending their free time in front of the stove. That’s why the consumer demands meat dishes, which are quick and easy to prepare.
A membrane skinning machine can help the meat producer to offer the products his consumer is expecting from him.

Upward trend for event shopping.

Appetizing meat dish creations in the butcher’s display or in the self-service counter tempt to buy.
Advantages of mechanical skinning:
Membrane skinning increases the value of meat pieces. This fulfills the high expectations of quality-oriented consumers.
Skinned fresh meat serves the demand for healthy meat portions that are simple and fast to prepare.
Meat products that are appetizingly presented at the sales counter or self-service area stimulate sales.
Skinned meat without sinew, fat or bits of membrane has a high-quality appearance, can be sold for a few cents more and thus promises more sales.

A membrane skinner optimizes yield and increases profitability:

It removes membrane with only a very low proportion of lean meat!
This technology ensures that the surface of the good meat cuts remains intact. Notches due to skinning with hand knives, which lead to drying and thus to distinct quality drops, are prevented. Furthermore, every gram of meat cut off in error costs money. In business that process large amounts of meat daily, this can quickly become expensive.

Butcheries and industrial meat processors skin their high-quality meat products since almost 50 years.

With success:
This technology comes from France, where traditionally, a big quantity of horse meat is eaten. This meat is surrounded by strong membranes that must be removed before preparation. For this reason, there was very early a big demand for machines that were able to simplify the traîteur’s work. More and more frequently, the butchers began to skin other types of meat, too, especially beef, veal, pork etc. This has enormously increased the profitability of meat sales, especially of high-quality cuts.

MAJA’s geographic proximity to France was beneficial: Being an international manufacturer of meat processing equipment, MAJA took advantage of its years of experience in the area of derinding machines and started in the 1970s with its first tests with membrane skinners. ‘Normal’ manual derinders were used, but it was quickly clear that their coarse tooth rollers were too aggressive to remove the fine meat membrane. This meant that the machines hat to be adapted to the special requirements and the first automatic membrane skinner generation was launched in 1977!

Video membrane skinning machine EVM 5004 manual skinning of different cuts

Membrane skinning of fillet head ends ESB 4434 V