Cut it your way

The huge volumes of chicken fillet needed to satisfy global demand go way beyond doing the job at home by hand. In high volume processing plants, intelligence has now become a truly indispensable aid in the automatic production of breast fillets. Factories need solutions that combine hardware and software in imaginative ways and can really think for themselves to make the best of each individual fillet. This means the optimum use of raw material, truly minimal giveaway and maximum profit.

Here’s some frequently asked questions about high-volume chicken fillet portioning.

Q How do consumers want their fillets?

Most people eat their breast meat products either at home or in a restaurant. In both cases, their choice will depend on family size and taste. This could be for fillets, tenderloins, medallions, strips, nuggets or cubes, each with its own detailed specification. Products should look and weigh the same and it should be possible to produce them in large volumes. Only high-speed intelligent portioning equipment can achieve this. These systems should have dual lanes and it should be easy to change from one portioning option to another.

Q How to cut a large chicken breast?

Broilers are becoming heavier with their large breast fillets becoming increasingly difficult to accommodate on retail tray packs. These packs often have a fixed weight and a fixed price. Heavier fillets, however, make it more difficult to hit the required pack weight, resulting in avoidable and unwanted giveaway. Portioning fillets to a uniform size and weight is an excellent solution to this problem. Intelligent equipment and making use of smart software will calculate how each fillet can be portioned most effectively to give the best possible use of raw material, reducing any giveaway to a minimum and maximising yield.

Q How to make more of offcuts?

Trim is an inevitable by-product of portioning. You will always have offcuts, however small. These are from top quality muscle meat and can be used to maximum effect in value-added further processed products. To realise their full potential, even the smallest pieces must be managed efficiently. It may sound obvious, but the best way to do this is to automatically separate trim from the main product in a controlled way, so that both proceed on separate conveyor systems to their next destination in the process. In this way, valuable off-cuts don’t end up as a bulk low value item. Their own dedicated processing line upgrades them to high-quality poultry meat.

Q How to make portion cuts look natural?

Good presentation is important too. Trimmed breast fillet should look natural and like it has not been trimmed at all. This means cutting with a slanting fillet edge. When cutting medallions, strips, nuggets or cubes, it is particularly important that all portions look identical and weigh exactly the same.

Modern portion cutters work extremely precisely and produce identical natural-looking cuts. It is even possible to adjust the angle of cut. This natural look no longer has to result in costly giveaway. Today, portioning is a fast process, where every gram counts. Cutting precision is now down to 5g. At 14 400 pieces per hour over an eight-hour shift, this comes to 115kg of valuable meat lost per day. When using modern portion cutting equipment, these losses are a thing of the past. No matter how the fillet is cut, it is done precisely using raw material to maximum effect.

Q How can technology help optimise portioning fillets?

Using the very latest vision control technology such as laser light together with innovative portioning software, it is possible to determine the exact shape of each fillet and calculate the best possible way of portioning it. A screen shows clearly how fillets are to be cut. Software enables remote programming and the storage of many customer-specific cutting programmes in its software menu.

Today’s customers, whether supermarket chains or quick service restaurants, demand a large portfolio of different products from poultry processors. It is, therefore, important that any portioning system not only handles high hourly volumes, but can also handle more than one product specification at the same time. Besides the ability to make different products on different lanes, it must be possible to switch quickly from one product to another. Intelligent software makes these changes possible by the tapping of a few keys.

Q What’s the ultimate in portioning fillets?

Intelligent software is also about collecting data. You don’t know what you don’t know! Having collected data and converting this into useful reports, operators will then have instant access to all key performance indicators presented centrally in a user-friendly format. Using this information, operators can keep the equipment performing at maximum efficiency.

Intelligence could then be taken a step further by linking separate intelligent systems. Supposing it were possible to link equipment, a pick and place robot, producing fixed weight tray packs of breast fillet to the intelligent portioning system. The robot would tell the portioner which pieces of meat to trim and by how much. This would result in packs with truly minimal giveaway. Dream or a very real reality? •

Marel - https://marel.com/en/poultry