Text 7. Opportunities from poultry processing

It is quite often the case that when a visitor attends a food technology show, he or she feels a bit over­whelmed by the variety of machines on display. In part, this is due to the fact that the food we eat comes in so many different forms, from sticky liquids to frozen solids. How do you really know whether a particular piece of equipment can be applied to the red meat industry?

This is one of the main advantages of visiting the International Poultry Exposition: poultry meat is similar enough to red meat that most of the fur­ther processing machines on display can be used within the red meat industry, in some cases in rather innovative ways.

One important aspect in food produc­tion is separating products into clearly defined weights or specific numbers of pieces. When doing so, it is critical that any deviation from these specifications is as small as possible in order to reduce giveaway.

Closely linked to these machines is packaging equipment, since often the batches go directly into the packaging line or the packages themselves need to be weighed both for quality control pur­poses and for printing a final label on the finished product, for example. It is therefore very desirable that the machines are well integrated so that the process runs as smoothly as possible.

Often enough, all one needs is a simple, sturdy and accurate scale.

Like bacon'n'eggs, batching and grading frequently come together in the same machine, which is mainly due to the fact that they are similar processes, in the sense that you group together or batch products of a similar quality or grade. The new grader series is suitable for grading and batching both meat and poultry and has a more clean­ing friendly design. We also improved the man-machine interface and provided it with more processing power to make the batching more exact. This then allows production managers to have an improved overview in order to optimize yield and minimize giveaway.

Special companies also introduced an improved design on their weighing system. Instead of using a conventional tube design for the frame, the company engi­neers opted for an open-frame design, which translates into less area where product pieces can lodge themselves and foster bacterial growth. Company also installed its own controller, designed to withstand the rigours of the working floor of a food processor. The company introduced another innovation in this area of technology, a new 9-inch (22.8cm) portion classifier designed to handle items like portioned steaks, pork chops and other small food portions weighing less than 21bs (900g) and shorter than 10 inches (25cm) in length. It is extremely fast and accurate with programmable controls that allow it to batch by count, weight or multiple product type, thus minimizing the incidence of overweight packing. Another company also introduced a batching system that they like to call the Speed Batcher. This breakthrough new system uses a patented method to intelli­gently speed-batch product. The system first divides the incoming flow of raw material into smaller portions. It then remixes them to create the desired pack­age weight. This high precision method is both faster and more accurate than its predecessors.

Although meat products are often sold based on their weight, some customers require a specific number of pieces per package. This task is frequently per­formed by hand, which increases labour costs as well as leading to miscounted batches with either too many or too few pieces.