FDBusiness.com

Poultry producers are facing new challenges all the time. Key current issues are hygiene, food safety, sustainability and satisfying ever increasing demand for meat from the world’s growing population. How is Marel coping with these challenges? For Marel, there is only one way to go and that is to innovate.

Growing World Population

The worldwide increase in demand for meat protein requires new and innovative ways for producing the necessary volumes. As the global leader in poultry processing technology, Marel Poultry is intimately involved in making the additional processing capacity available. This means large scale industrialization, for which Marel Poultry offers the very best in automated high speed processing solutions, where the interests of both processors and consumers are always kept firmly in mind. To satisfy demand for the large volumes of poultry meat now needed, line speeds are increasing at an accelerating rate. Both capacity and performance need to increase too.

Sustainability

With innovative concepts which respect poultry, people and the planet, Marel Poultry is committed to the sustainability of its systems and solutions. The Stork AeroScalder is an excellent example. Traditional immersion scalding techniques use huge amounts of hot water. In the AeroScalder, products are not immersed in hot water but scalded using moisturized hot air which is blown onto them. This innovative concept saves up to 75% water and up to 50% energy. An additional bonus is that there is no cross-contamination during the process.

The “Robot with a Knife” concept is a process which maximizes product use and avoids give-away.

No Give-away, Maximum Value

Making the best use of product by avoiding costly give-away is part of the sustainability program. As each part of a processed product is highly valuable, losing just one gram of meat per product could mean the daily loss of 108 kg. That is why maximizing product use and avoiding give-away is one of Marel Poultry’s focus areas. Innovative technologies have been developed to give intelligent composite solutions such as the “robot with a knife” consisting of the I-Cut 122 Portion Cutter paired with the RoboBatcher Flex. The combination cuts strictly to customer order while the resulting offcuts are batched as valuable products in their own right.

Hygiene

As even the smallest localized incidence of bacterial contamination in the food chain can have much wider even global implications, hygiene has become of paramount importance for the food processing industry. Marel Poultry is keenly aware of this and offers solutions which help processors produce the safest possible food. Automation plays a key role here by doing away with the need for people to touch product. “Our maturation chilling system is a first-class example,” says Anton de Weerd, General Managing Director of Marel Poultry. “The cross-contamination of product with harmful bacteria is virtually eliminated. Product is fresher and shelf life significantly longer. The process both pre-chills and matures product to give very tender meat in a relatively short process time.”

Tracking the Food

Food safety and hygiene are closely related. A comprehensive tracking and tracing system is the best way for a processing plant to ensure food safety. Marel Poultry has developed just such a tracking and tracing system.  The moment a product enters the plant, the collection of data on it begins. Further data is added as it moves through the process. Data stays with the product, enabling retail consumers to check the origin and trustworthiness of what they are buying.

Innovative, accurate and reliable tracking and tracing would not be possible without a comprehensive software system. Marel’s Innova software has opened up new possibilities for effective poultry processing management. Today’s poultry processing plant can hold up to 40,000 broilers from beginning to end of the process. Innova software will register the weight, quality grade and eventual destination of each and every product in the process.  By using Innova to monitor and control production, poultry processors can significantly improve the efficiency and safety of their process.

For further information visit marel.com/poultry.