Xiaobo Zou

School of Food and Biological Engineering, Jiangsu University

The current situation of the catering industry in our country is a large market, small enterprises, labor-intensive. And the Chinese food market is a trillion-level market. Most domestic businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises, with slow food production and high labor costs, making it difficult to compete with McDonald's and KFC. Establishing a scientifically efficient central kitchen system is an inevitable trend in the Chinese catering industry. There are already many central kitchens in the country, but they have not yet formed a standardized, scaled, intensive, and informatized production model. The main bottleneck is the lack of specialized Chinese equipment, low level of automation, and poor compatibility, resulting in the use of small pots instead of big pots, mass production with a large number of workers, resembling an enlarged traditional kitchen. The innovation and development of intelligent processing equipment for Chinese staple food dishes are urgently needed to break through.

We focus on the research and development of complete equipment for Chinese set meals, starting with specialized technology and key equipment research for ingredient conditioning, rice steaming, dish cooking, and packaging recycling. Specifically, regarding ingredient conditioning, we prioritize addressing issues such as high energy consumption and low level of continuity in conditioning equipment. For rice steaming, our focus is on resolving the contradiction between continuous production of rice and high-quality taste and nutrition. As for dish cooking, we emphasize tackling the problem of quality distortion in large-scale industrial processing of ingredients. In terms of packaging recycling, our main goal is to address the challenges of automating precise measurement and packaging for Chinese dishes. Finally, by combining clean production and intelligent distribution technologies, we aim to develop a complete set of automated equipment for Chinese central kitchens and resolve the organic matching and systematic integration issues among various equipment in central kitchens.

We have focused on the development of intelligent processing equipment for Chinese staple food dishes, with key research undertaken in unmanned intelligent rice production line equipment and whole-grain simultaneous cooking equipment. Additionally, we have developed key processing equipment for flour products, such as fully automatic noodle makers, versatile stuffing machines, and humanoid shaping equipment. Building upon breakthroughs in key technologies, we have also developed intelligent frying equipment based on a new heat source, intelligent frying equipment utilizing low-frequency electrostatic fields, intelligent steaming and baking equipment utilizing superheated steam, as well as equipment for the collection and crushing of kitchen waste, packaging equipment for Chinese dishes, and a distribution system for Chinese set meals.