PROCESSING
How to automate food safety in the poultry industry? Where automation replaces human labor, food production is safer Food safety is rightly a key issue in today’s poultry industry. Everyone wants to eat food, which is safe. Although the poultry meat supply chain is larger than just the processing facility, in the end, our industry is held responsible when the produced food isn’t safe. a whole product or a cut portion. All steps in the process are fully automated with human input being limited to veterinary inspection, supervision and the packing of edible giblets.
Eyes, not hands Human hands are the most critical contaminant in a poultry processing plant. Every touch is potentially contaminating. Where automation is available for a process, machines should do the work. In an ideal world, human input would be limited to supervision only, eyes and not hands.
That’s why all processes in the factory must be dedicated to food safety. Fortunately, there are many ways to secure the safe handling of poultry food. Good cleaning, hygiene, prevention of cross-contamination and the least human intervention are a few key components. By automating the process, these points of attention can be tackled much easier. To ensure a truly safe process, processes should be kept in line and, where possible, should be automated. Marel now offers processing systems capable of handling up to 15,000 bph, where products are kept in line from live bird hang-on until their release as
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Product should flow as smartly as possible through all stages of the process. Not only do buffers involve costly double handling, they also risk gains in temperature, which will encourage the growth of harmful bacteria and shorten shelf life. The aim should be to move product as quickly as possible from live bird hang-on to the cold store.
Safe transport To move poultry products safely from A to B, the transport mustn’t be done by humans, but automatically. In the primary process, Marel’s overhead conveyors take care that products don’t touch each other, preventing cross-contamination. Once unloaded from the shackles, SystemFlex conveyors take over the safe transport, maintaining the in-
