IFFA 2025 live: Multivac CEO talks automization, digitalization and sustainability in sliced products
07 May 2025 | Multivac
At IFFA 2025 in Frankfurt, Germany, Multivac’s group president (CEO), Christian Traumann, explains how sliced meat producers can navigate rising costs and qualified personnel shortages with automated and digitalized slicing machinery. Traumann also explores the growing significance of waste reduction and climate change mitigation in the food industry.
Fin Greens first from IA 2025 in Frankfurt.
We're at the Multivax stand with Christian Trauman, who is the Greek president and CEO.
Welcome to you.
Thank you.
So my first question at this year's show, you're demonstrating how sliced products can be processed efficiently and cost effectively.
What particular benefits do you offer in this market?
Yeah we show a lot of different slices.
Maybe let's concentrate on our high output.
Raw ham product slicing.
It offers various advantages.
Part of it is the multi-bike line control, and within this multi-bike line control we have a new feature which allows you to change product on the flight so you don't have to empty the machine.
So you can just have one single row of packs empty and then you can start with a new product.
Brings down your conversion time by more than 95%, saves a lot of cost in respect to material labels, all that kind of stuff, and prevents problems happening.
So that is one of the one of the features we are showing.
Also we reduce energy costs by shutting down the machine as soon as the machine.
See that there is no product on the machine.
It turns down all the electrical power.
It turns down the pressure, the cooling water, everything.
So that is something which is new and which really adds value for our customer and it adjusts automatically all the products due to this multi line control, all the products within the line, so the infeed, the slicer, the pack.
Machine.
Everything is adjusted by just one screen, and one tip, and off it goes.
OK, it's interesting.
And as you know, the industry is facing rising costs and also a growing shortage of personnel.
How do your solutions help to overcome these problems?
Yeah, the issue is if we look at the cost issue, we see that the consumption of material, we spoke about that earlier just to make sure.
Sure that you can change over on the fly, reduce the consumption of material, and make it easy to operate, have a stable process over the multi-bike line control, and for example with our smart services, we monitor consumption of everything of air, electric power, water, so we can also creeping rising costs we we can prevent that from happening.
Right in the beginning because we monitor that very closely and you get a report immediately if something goes wrong.
So that is something and multi-bike line control is really super easy to operate, so you don't need a lot of labor because you can run a whole line from one screen and secondly, you don't need so much high trained labor because the HMI is simplified so it makes it easy for people to work on.
OK, so you mentioned that your machines help to facilitate waste reduction in terms of material, also increased energy efficiency.
What does this mean for climate change mitigation and how much of a concern is this for your customers?
This is a big issue.
Definitely, definitely this, this sustainability is the biggest issue also in our industry, so, so.
Want to use monofilm, for example, go away from this multilayer films.
They have a very clear sight on if the product needs to be cooled.
We have a new cutting head in our machine which allows us to use much higher temperatures during the cutting process.
And give very nice, very nice results.
So I think these are a lot of things.
For example, also a very nice feature is our spray in Geneva where you don't put any plastic in between the slices, but we spray a vegetable oil, a tasteless vegetable oil, which allows.
The product to be separated and all these small things plus our energy consumption monitoring, all these small things reduce cost and give a value to the customer.
That's interesting.
As a final question, in what ways can you, what are your key focuses looking forwards in terms of innovation developments and how do you optimize these machines even further?
Yeah, it's, it's automization.
It's digitalization and it's sustainability.
I think these are our main focuses on our lines at the moment, and we have just set out new targets until 2030 and one of them is sustainability.
So we look, we make sure that we use as little plastic as possible, as simple as possible, so mono material being used.
We make sure that we don't waste anything.
Also have a secondhand market for our machines so that after the useful life we will refurbish machines and bring them back to the markets where they are needed.
So we focus on a lot of stuff in that context and make sure we deliver the value customer needs and there is competition and that's great because everybody is thinking very hard on what to do better.
That's great.
Thanks for your time today.
Enjoy the rest of the show.
Thank you very much.
