How DANA Technology helps pet food manufacturers get more from their raw materials
DANA Technology helps wet pet food producers extract more value from lower-grade raw materials with two specialist processing technologies.
The Danish company, based in Tommerup, designs and builds processing machinery for wet pet food manufacturers worldwide.
With a team of more than 150 years of combined experience, it handles every project from specification and engineering to commissioning, with each setup adapted to the customer’s existing production environment.
Texturizing lower-grade meat
The DANA Rotary Disc Texturizer (RDT), developed in-house by Lars Christian Nielsen and protected by a US patent (US Patent 12419325 B2), processes lower-grade meat raw materials and converts them into structured, meat-like premium chunks. This includes salmon trimmings, poultry offcuts and mechanically separated meat.
Through a combination of rotation and heat, it coagulates proteins into a texture that looks, feels and performs like premium whole-muscle meat.
The practical outcome is that manufacturers can take raw materials that would otherwise produce a lower-value product and turn them into something that competes directly with prime-cut pet food on appearance, texture and shelf price. Six new RDT units have been shipped to manufacturers across multiple countries, with more finalized for shipment.
“One of our customers was recovering around 70% of usable product from their salmon raw material before the RDT,” says CEO Vagn Hansen. “Now they are above 90%, and the finished chunk looks and performs like a premium product. That changes both what a production line costs to run and what it earns.”
Cooking and shaping at scale
DANA Technology also builds the Steam and Cooling Tunnel, which handles the cooking and shaping of wet pet food at capacities between 500kg and 4,000kg per hour.
Delivering consistent results across batches, it includes an automated cleaning system that reduces downtime between production runs. Both machines are backed by a team with more than 150 years of combined experience in food and pet food processing.
“A lot of manufacturers we meet are leaving value on the table without realizing it,” says Head of Sales Pedro Fossat. “They have the raw material, they just do not have the right machine to do something useful with it.”
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