Industrial Food Machine of the Day: Slicing Your Breakfast Pastry With a Water Jet

Am I the only one wondering what it will do to flesh & bone?

Go ahead Mr. Water-Jet guy... put your hand in there.

The article offers an interesting suggesting for cutting food. I can only imagine this saw has been around a long time and that makes me wonder, why haven't the food industry adopted this saw. Yea all kinds of safety issues do come to mind.

I'll stick with knives, thanks. The last thing I want is some dim-witted minimum-wage pastry drone slicing off his fingers because "it's just water"...

I think this device is an industrial cutter. I would expect it would be set up on automated "assembly" lines. Even if there were to be a human placing the food (unlikely), they would only need to wear gloves that could not be cut by the jet. I think the videos are only for demonstration of the technology.

Hmm, you make a good point, Far Out Man, and the article title does say ‘Industrial Food Machine of the Day: Slicing Your Breakfast Pastry With a Water Jet’.

Hence the words ’Industrial Food Machine’ is being used. I think it would have been most useful in this article had we known where this is actively being used at. Is that information in the article somewhere and I are just over looking it? Why leave it out?

These things are regularly used for cutting metal. My father worked on one for several years and he used it for cutting steel and aircraft aluminium. Very very dangerous, gloves won't help dangerous.

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@caradoc01
the jets used to cut metal have an abrasive added (ex. garnet) so it's not the water that is doing the cutting (search for Aquacut for example). For food processing only water can be used. The maker here claims it can cut a 1" steak. That shows you the limitation of just using water as the cutter. It should be quite easy to obtain existing safety gloves that can not be cut by this type of water jet.

The last video cuts through kitchen floor, so some safety should be used. Seems likely it can cut your flesh pretty easy.

The very concept seems like a good idea, because there are fewer tools to cut the food and collect bacteria’s.

I wonder while the water is cutting meat, it also splattering bacteria’s in a microscopic mist about the room? Then again, a spinning cutting blade would splatter about those bacteria’s too.

it would be really easy to add a sensor so the jet wont cut if there is something hot in the way when cutting cold stuff (someones limb) or simply just use a barrier, that if not closed prevents the machine from running. it would be really easy.

@Robot
I'm only guessing but that flooring is quite soft and designed to be cut. There should be safety gloves that would be much tougher to cut. No question that although this water jet might not be able to sever a finger, it would cause significant damage. As for the mist, if that was an issue, I think they would used some type of venting to prevent cross-contamination.

@catfish bandit
most likely ... if somehow this type of cutter required hand loading and dexterity, so gloves could not be worn, some other safety system would be used. The sensors might be as simple as IR beams that stop the knife if their signals are interrupted by any object blocking their path ... or a knife trigger switch that requires the operator to stand back. There must be dozens of existing technologies already in use that could be applied if necessary.