Poultry Processing Worldwide
Portioning options
Growth in sales of whole-muscle nuggets, strips
and sandwich portions has increased processors’
need for size reduction equipment.
Foodservice accounts have
become one of the broiler
industry’s major outlets for
breast meat. Sales of whole-muscle
items such as nuggets, strips and
sandwich portions have helped fuel
the growth in deboning. Faster-growing birds and the pounds per
man-hour, and yield advantages
of processing larger birds have led
to processors pushing up weights
of birds raised for deboning. Just
10 years ago, a 6.5-pound (3kg)
live weight broiler was considered
a “big bird” in the US industry,
but now the target live weight for
many “big bird” plants is 8 pounds
( 3.8kg) and higher.
Larger birds mean bigger
breast-meat butterflies, fillets and
tenders. On average, an 8-pound
( 3.8kg) live-weight bird will provide
a breast butterfly that weighs 1. 8
pounds (.8kg). Now, even some
products like “chicken tenders”
sold in restaurants are actually
tender pieces cut from the roughly
3-ounce (85g) tenders that come off
an 8-pound ( 3.8kg) bird. Processors
are doing more slicing, slitting,
cubing and cutting of raw poultry
meat then ever before.
Sizing and cutting
Many whole-muscle, single-piece foodservice breast-meat
products need to be made within
tight specifications for length,
width, thickness and weight. These
specifications have been designed
to ensure things like uniform
cooking time, proper bun coverage
and portion control. Poultry
processors have only three options
Photos courtesy of Prime Equipment Group
Tenders can be mechanically portioned into two or three naturally shaped pieces.
Terrence O’Keefe
for making these size single-piece
whole-muscle products: hand sizing
and cutting, volumetric sizing and
mechanical cutting, and vision
system sizing and mechanical
cutting. Making whole-muscle,
multiple-piece, portioned products,
like those made by the Stork Food
Systems’ RevoPortioner, is not
covered in this article.
Hand sizing and cutting is still
the primary method of producing
portion control pieces of breast-meat items at some US broiler
plants and at many plants in
other countries. People working
with scales and either knives or
scissors cut pieces of meat to fit
customer specifications. In these
plants, dozens of individuals
can be occupied with producing
portions for sandwiches. Because
of the relatively small size of the
finished portions, usually 3 to
5 ounces (85 to 141g) each, the
labour cost of manually producing
these sandwich portions is high.
Many US plants now reserve hand
portioning only for pieces of meat
left over after a mechanical process
has cut a portion or portions from
that piece.
Volumetric portioning
The concept behind volumetric
portioning is relatively simple; meat
is drawn or pushed into a mould,
sized to hold the desired amount,
and the meat outside of the mould
is cut off. This volumetric process
has been patented by Tyson Foods,
Inc, in the US, and Marel Food
