Episode 80 – The Future of Meat Processing with Blake Wortley of Flow Waterjet

The Future of Meat Processing with Blake Wortley of Flow Waterjet

In the 80th episode of IoT Podcast: Over the Air, Ryan Prosser, CEO of Very, is joined by Blake Wortley, Global Product Manager at Flow Waterjet, a global leader in ultrahigh-pressure process solutions for the last 60 years.

Join Ryan and Blake as they explore how technology such as water jets, IoT, and robotics are revolutionizing the future of meat processing industry. As the labor shortage continues, companies are using robotics and advanced vision systems to improve efficiency, workplace conditions, and product quality, such as water jets.

Blake shares how the technology reduces risks of cross-contamination and offers a safe method to meet consumer preferences for various meat cuts. Additionally, they dive into Flow Waterjet’s innovations and goal of maintaining its industry-leading position into 2025 and beyond.

If you want to learn more about the future of Meat Processing and using IoT and robotics for jobs people don’t want to do, subscribe to the podcast.

About the Show

“Over the Air” is a podcast that features unfiltered conversations with executives about their IoT journeys. We cover the mistakes they made, the lessons they learned, and what they wished they’d known when they started. In each episode of Over the Air, our expert guests share their insights and stories you won’t hear anywhere else.

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Connect with Blake Wortley

• Blake Wortley on LinkedIn
• Flow Waterjet Website

Transcript

I’m super excited to talk about this, you know, I find Waterjet so fascinating in all the different ways it can be used. Budget overruns, brick devices, data breaches, building connected products is hard. Welcome to Over the Air, sharp, unfiltered conversations with executives about their IoT journeys, the mistakes they made, the lessons they learned, and what they wish they’d known when they started. 

I’m your host, Ryan Prosser. Welcome back to Over the Air, IoT connected devices and the journey. My name is Ryan Prosser, CEO of  Very. 

Today I’m joined by very special co host Bill Brock, CEO of Perdio. And our guest is Blake Wortley, global product manager at Flow Waterjet. We’re gonna be talking about using IoT and robotics to do jobs that people don’t want to. 

Blake, thanks for being on the show. Hey, Ryan, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be on the episode. 

I’ve been following you guys for a while, so it’s good getting to join you guys and getting to talk about some interesting stuff. Awesome. Always good to interview a fan. 

So Flow Waterjet, people may not think of water jets as doing jobs people don’t want to, but tell us a little bit about the company and then we’ll jump into it. So Flow is the world leader in ultra high pressure water cutting applications. They’re actually the inventor of the abrasive cutting technology. 

So what does that mean? That means that you can cut basically any material, any thickness using the power of water. And so it’s a great technology has so many different use cases, from metal fabrication to stone and tile glass, and then things that we’re going to talk about today with jobs people don’t want to do and getting into things like food processing and other things. So just an amazing technology, a great company that’s out there leading the charge for this new technology. 

It’s not new in the sense of, you know, it’s recent, but it’s new in the sense of, you know, in the world of milling and cutting and things like that. So excited to get to talk about it and get to share a little bit more of what you can do with Waterjet. So long time followers of the show bonus points if you spotted a familiar voice Blake has been on before. 

He’s our first ever conference short form in studio long form episodes. So Blake congrats on being the first ever to make that jump. So you mentioned just a second ago jobs people don’t want to do there are a lot of them. 

But one of the things that we’re going to be talking about today and you mentioned it when we’re at the fab tech in Chicago, was meat processing. And I for one did not realize people were using water jets in the meat processing world. And once you walked me through it, it made a ton of sense. 

And I told our producer, we got to have Blake on the show long form. Talk about meat processing, I can totally and I think our audience can totally make the leap that you know, working in a chicken processing plant or whatever is probably not like a dream job for most folks, that is going to fall squarely under the people don’t want to do it. High ick factor. 

Tell us a little bit about that world, keep it PG and then we’ll get more into how this problem is being solved. But just talk about I think at the outset, in terms of people don’t want to do this, give us some background. Yeah, so I mean, starting out, you’re going to think about this in the large scale processing. 

I mean, there’s all different scales. But let’s start with talking about large scale processing. You know, it’s a very labor intensive job. 

It’s under work conditions that are not ideal between you trying to keep things clean, trying to keep meat cold. There’s just a lot that goes into it. And then it’s also a pretty highly skilled job. 

I mean, trying to process meat at a very high rate and a high efficiency takes a lot of practice. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of time to build up those skills. 

And then you add into that things like the tool special tooling that you need between yolks, not just your standard kitchen knife and is going to cut it for you. You’re using all kinds of different processes in there. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. 

As far as a job, people aren’t that interested in doing you know, it’s something that as we see across multiple industries, labor shortages, people are going to gravitate to those jobs that are going to be more comfortable that are going to pay well and things like that. And so when you look at our food industry as a whole, there’s just a lot of manual labor in that. And so a lot of companies are looking for how do we reduce that? How do we make these work conditions better? How do we use other technology to where we can make this a better place to be, but not only just for people, but also the end products? How do we get the most out of our throughput? How do we gain the highest amount of efficiency? Because again, at the end of the day, companies are looking for the easiest solution to make the most amount of money. 

And that’s what we want to support. Yeah, it feels to some extent, like COVID broke the labor market up until 2019. It seemed like most people still viewed a job as a job. 

And then there was this kind of like nationwide rethink on things. I don’t know all the details. And I don’t want to get into COVID for sure. 

But you know, it does feel like after the lockdowns and so forth, it became a lot more difficult to recruit for. I don’t want to do it type jobs. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if from the vantage point of 2030 or 2013, that ends up being one of the great catalysts of the robotics industry, you know, that, oh, wow, you know, you had to have this forcing function of labor shortages to really push it forward. 

So meat processing, and we’re going to talk about small form meat processing later. So think for folks at home, think like you’re the folks that are processing your local farms, chickens and cows, and even whitetail deer for hunters and things like that. But talk about like, how robotics are being utilized in that area.

And then we’ll talk about your specific application. But just talk about the robotics piece to bridge the gap for us. Yeah. 

So again, when you start thinking about labor shortages, whether that’s whatever is causing that or whatever is driving that, you know, how do you start looking at processes that you can automate to remove that need for labor, or at least the amount that you need? You’re always going to need good skilled people. That’s always a given. But there are tasks and different functions within that, that robots can come alongside your workforce in actually, you know, help improve the efficiency of your total company. 

And so it’s just utilizing those different technologies that are out there. I mean, vision systems have been around for a long time, helping with quality control, helping with different orientation type stuff. And it’s just the same type of thing, but done in a food application. 

So being, you know, those same robots been made out of material, stainless steel, and whatever to cut down on any kind of contamination, bacteria, things like that. So from a safety and health standpoint, as well as an efficiency standpoint, here we have a couple of those together and get a lot of general. So all of that is robotics. 

You’re here to talk about water jets, which is what happens next. And so this is what I found so fascinating at Fabtech. And it made it immediately clicked for me when you were talking it through. 

Of course, a water jet at high enough psi is is going to be superior to a blade, because there’s no consumable. So you know, your material cost on the saw blade side of things can be less, but also nothing to get like gummed up with animal fat and nothing that can break no, no risk of like small bits of metal accidentally ending up in the final product, which is probably a safety concern, so forth. Yeah, talk about the water jet piece of this, because this is what I really found fascinating. 

So the conveyor belt AI machine, you know, machine vision has oriented everything. But now it’s time to get down to business and cut into the primals and the sub primals, you know, of an animal. Take it from there.

Yeah, so now I’m super excited to talk about this, you know, I find water jets so fascinating in all the different ways it can be used. The other thing that lets you do is, you know, as consumers are moving more and more towards ease of use. So, you know, there’s odds maybe when you go to a grocery store now, it’s a lot more boneless, skinless, me is what people are looking for. 

And they’re, you know, whether it’s grilling it, whether it’s baking, whatever you’re doing with that, however you’re cooking it, people are wanting that meat as ready to consume as possible. We’ve got two boys at home. They love their dining.

They know nuggets and, you know, they think it’s cool to get to get the little stegosaurus or the T-Rex or whatever, and kind of play as they eat, if you will. And so getting to cut out those little, you know, shapes and everything, method, trying to do that with some kind of mechanical cutter, you know, whether it’s either by hand or even a robotic version, but blade dolls or whatever, all of a sudden your T-Rex is going to be some blob instead of someone tell what it is. So just, you know, to have that product of what you’re looking for, being able to do kind of the fun, unique things that a lot of companies are doing, as well as just the standard uniform cuts of meat. 

So it kind of bridges both sides from your small processor who’s looking for just, I want to just go cut things as uniform as possible and as quickly as possible to your, to your large ultra scale. We were going to make all these cool, convenience foods. And, you know, that’s where wirejet comes in. 

And then the last thing I want to touch on is the safety factor. Again, you know, being a USDA approved methodology, you’re not introducing cross-contamination, you know, as you’re running that stuff through, once that water goes through, it’s done, it’s gone. And then also from a, from a maintenance standpoint, you don’t have to worry about swapping out any blades, extremely long tool life, extremely long running times. 

You don’t have unexpected downtime. You don’t run along and have a bunch of lost product because all of a sudden something was dull or something broke or, or anything like that. So there’s just so many advantages when it comes to utilizing waterjet and it’s really not only hasn’t been used for a while, but seeing a lot of growth in those markets.

Two quick editor’s notes for the audience. Number one, and our previous guest or a longtime guest Green Mountain Grills, I’m certain would agree with this. We do not condone the cooking of boneless cuts of meat on this show. 

We, we are solidly a bone in crowd here. But, but I don’t think that’s any easier. Actually, I think like cutting bone in cuts and water jets, just give us like two sentences on this. 

Water jets just as effective at producing bone in cuts as boneless, correct? Or is that a more difficult problem? Yeah, no, it’s definitely still doable. And it’s just, you got to take it a little bit differently. So when you’re cutting with pure water only, typically what we say is if you can cut those with some kind of a hand shears or whatever, that’s what pure water only is going to be great for. 

There’s a lot of companies that do allow or go for bone cutting. You can still do it in a few different ways. But do you typically are going to introduce a safe form of an abrasive that can be a lot of different forms, but that’s just basically a media that gets introduced that water stream moving at that same speed.

To help us get through those harder things. So those boning cuts, exactly. You can still do it. 

Absolutely. Still a lot of cool ways of going about and doing that with water jet. It just changes a little bit at how you would set that up. 

But the same premise is all there, you know, minimal, minimal curve, extremely clean cuts, extremely consistent cuts, no dolly and things like that. So Blake, on the back of that, water jet technology, not new. People have been using this for a long time, but the applications, the way you guys are using it is definitely new and paired with, you know, AI. 

Yeah. Just like, can you talk about some of the quote unquote, wrong side of impossibles that you guys have had to solve to be able to use water jet tech in some of this meat processing applications? Yeah, so I think when you look at across that industry, where we’ve been able to solve some problems that other technologies can’t, you know, it can come down to a lot of different ways. Again, it’s that safety factor. 

It’s being able to have that those clean cuts. So again, trying to maximize when it really comes down to is maximizing your efficiency, maximizing your output. And so there’s, you know, trying to get into too many specific names, but, you know, some of those larger corporations looking for those very specific situations where, you know, if you look at our food market in general, or our food industry in general, it’s a pretty short window from, okay, we are growing or raising an animal to now that meat is in a store and ready to be consumed.

And so when it comes to things like what we talked about earlier, whether that’s COVID or whatever driving these labor shortages, there’s a lot of companies right now that are struggling to say, man, we have this huge need. We have this huge demand. How do we meet this? Even if you look at it from a local standpoint, I have a local butcher shop that I frequent that does everything that I could ever want to do.

At the same time, it’s easy for them to get overloaded. And, you know, when it comes to maybe, you know, it’s hunting season, and you harvest a deer, and then you bring that in, they’re already, they could already be full because they have such limited capacity right now. And so being able to develop these specific machines that are plug and play in these different areas to say, you know, remove some of that pent up demand and be able to help them move things through quicker.

So instead of having all this congested food that taken a long time to get through, and now we’re starting to see shortages in the store, able to bring this in, get them up online very quickly because a lot of the stuff is we’re able to order right off the shelf from our company because we do a really good job of how we’re stocking things and what we have ready to go very short lead times. And so we’re able to help some of these companies that are really far behind get caught up and keep that supply chain of food rolling through without any interruptions. Blake, actually, I think Bill had a question for you. 

Bill, you were going to take us back a step. Go for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Dino chicken nuggets. Amazing. No, I’m kidding. 

But I’m not going to take the bait there, despite that being a fascinating topic that I could talk on for days. But you guys are doing a lot of very interesting things on the edge. And to the untrained eye, this might sound more like mechanical engineering or electrical engineering problem.

I’m curious if you could just go one click deeper on the software side and some of the challenges that you guys are having to solve and really what it means to be at the leading edge in this space. Yeah, so I appreciate the question, Bill. And in your ride, there’s a lot of ways that you can look at this and try to attribute it to those different functions.

But when it really comes down to it, a lot of that secret sauce or what really truly powers a water jet, that there is the pressure side of it that is absolutely unique technology. But it’s then when you have that stream of water, what’s it going to do? Because it behaves very differently. Those laws of physics can come into play in different ways when you start putting that ultra high pressure or hyper pressure to water.

How is it going to react in those situations? And so having the software that understands that. So that’s when they are specifically for flow that I just love our team and how much time and effort and development has went into and continues to go into developing those cut models to understand these different materials. Because that’s one of the ways that we tried to make it very easy for our end users. 

So when you have a profile or whatever you’re trying to cut, doesn’t matter if it’s out of food, out of meat or metal or anything else. We have a huge library where our end user is able to just basically select the type of material that they’re cutting and whatever the general thicknesses of that. And the cut model takes care of all the rest. 

You don’t have to know your feed speeds, all these other things that are that are typically required in traditional machining centers. And so having that software that’s smart enough to take it and say, OK, for this particular application, this is what I need to run at. We also have the cut models to say, OK, as you have that curve, what water actually would do is it will start to widen at the bottom of that cut.

So the thicker the material, the more you actually kind of be able to see that. So we have the software and the cutting head technology to actually orientate that in a way. Whatever your final product is, it can still have, if it’s a straight line or if you’re doing a bevel cut or whatever, you have the accuracy that you need to.

In this case, what we’re talking about, like meat processing, again, getting in super close to those bones and being able to follow that curvature in a way. And just having that software that can translate all that to allow our users not to have to know how to do all that. They know what they need to get out of the machine. 

Our machine knows how to achieve that. So that’s one of the really awesome ways that our software is so critical to the foundation and to the running of our machines. That’s really cool. 

It gives me a nice picture of how it can be adapted. Are you guys getting like, what’s your customer feedback look like? How are you getting that feedback in the field on like the performance of the equipment and the models and whatnot? So we do a lot of different ways. So one, we have a global sales team that is all regional.

And so they’re talking with customers every single day, visiting customers, talking to them on the phone, whatever. Same thing on our service sites. We have our own complete service team that are all, again, regionally based.

So not only from taking care of servicing equipment, but also just there to communicate with customers. We have a customer service side that is reaching out and touching those customers to partner with them. And that’s one of the keys that Flow is always striving to be the easiest company to do business with.

And so how we’re interacting with our customers. And then from my side, on the product management side, doing the same things, visiting customers, talking with them, setting up phone calls, both from when customers are getting new machine reinstalled, but also customers who have been running 10, 12, 15, 30 new years, whatever it is. Because there’s so much knowledge out there.

I mean, we are the experts of the machines we build. But there are people out there that are the experts on how to use our machines for their particular application. And we absolutely want to learn from them.

We want to understand what are they solving? Where are some of the pain points that our equipment can maybe come at alongside? I’ve talked to some stone shops recently where the past technology using saw blades and other things, they still were left with a lot of issues because they do a lot of intricate pieces and then they were having to do a lot by hand because the saw blades would chip the material or whatever. And so figuring out ways to utilize a water jet to solve a lot of that and treat five axis cutting allowed them to get rid of most of the saw cutting in their facility and move to more water jets, specifically flow water jets, that solved a lot of those problems. So it’s just that feedback loop, whether that’s in person, on the phone.

We also have a lot of different web-based applications, customer dashboard and so forth that allows us to have input from customers as well as feedback back to them. Blake, as you guys look ahead, you know, in these amazingly creative use cases and the tech that continues to develop to unlock more, what’s next for you guys? What are you excited about as you look to 25 and beyond? So absolutely, we always want to be on that cutting edge, kind of pun intended there a little bit. But as the inventor of a bracelet water jet cutting, we’ve been the industry leader since the beginning and we’re going to make sure we maintain that.

And so there’s a lot of really cool things. I’m going to touch on a couple of them. And then when it comes specifically to this podcast and why we talked in the first place, we recently launched our connected machine platform, Waterjet Connect.

And so with that, we’re working through that. So there’s a lot of work going in right now, not just to have connected machines, but truly smart machines that are going to help customers. Again, you don’t need to be the expert of our machine.

You just need to be the expert of what you need. And then our machine is going to work with you to give you the output of what you’re looking for. And so to really continue to drive down that pathway of these smart machines, you know, machines that are easy to run, they’re easy to work on, they’re machines that are going to make you money.

And that’s where we’re really focusing on our efforts right now, is just that continuation of developing that platform, developing how smart our machines are. I mean, we already have so much technology and so many different people’s heads, whether that’s our engineers here, our manufacturers, you know, that’s all done in-house. You know, so it’s kind of pulling that information out of them and putting it into that machine learning AI realm to allow each and every one of our machines down the field to be just as smart as our most senior engineer that we have here.

And last question, you know, I know you guys are real big on vertical integration. We didn’t talk about this year, but Flow is part of a bigger deal that has partners up and down the value chain. Who out there is doing good work in your part of the world, you know, IoT sense that you think not enough people are talking about? Yeah, so there’s one company in particular, you know, the company is Software AG and they have an IoT platform called Key Velocity.

We partnered with them for a little while now. They’ve been a great company to work with from a startup getting into the smart connected machine realm. It’s been a really great partnership and they came alongside of us and helped us a lot on the development side, as well as utilizing their Key Velocity platform from a data display, from an algorithm standpoint.

But then that’s just one aspect. I mean, there’s so many different companies and I’ll definitely be very honest in this in saying, you know, working with very technologies has also been good. We’ve not done direct work, but just talking with your team, getting ideas.

And that’s what I love about the industry in total. There’s so many, especially when you start talking on the software, the AI, the IoT realms. There’s so many companies that are very open right now.

There’s not a lot of people who are now, you know, we don’t want to talk about this. Everyone’s excited. Everyone’s learning at the same time.

And so getting to work with companies like yourself, Brian, where it’s just been really great for me learning. You know, my background is not in the AI world or the IoT world, but getting to learn a lot as I go, getting to learn more and more about the software realm of things. So those are two companies that have been very valuable for us and helped us in our journey.

And I see you continuing to help us. All right. Well, you heard it here first.

That might be some of the next guests we have on the show. Appreciate the look in there, Blake. And thanks for being on the show.

It’s been great. I appreciate you guys having me. I enjoy getting to talk with you both.

It’s been a really cool experience for me. Looking forward to seeing what each of us get to do, moving through the rest of 2024 and then on into 2025. I’ll be following your guys’ podcast closely.

And again, thanks for having me on. Yeah, absolutely. And for those at home, thank you for listening.

Join us next time as we interview another executive and talk about things that went wrong on a journey that went right. Folks, before we wrap, if you’re out there trying to figure out how to get started with your IoT project, I’ve got some news.  Very Technology has just published an e-book called How to Choose the Right IoT Company.

It’s a guide designed to help you ask the right questions, narrow down your search, and find the right partner. If you’re interested, you can find out more on our website at  VeryTechnology.com. Over the air is presented by Very, your trusted source for cutting-edge technology solutions. For the latest updates and exclusive content, be sure to follow Over the Air on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else great podcasts are found.

On behalf of the team here at Very, thanks for listening.

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