In poultry processing, every cut has the potential to increase or decrease profits. While one miscut seems insignificant, when your poultry line is processing 15,000 birds per hour, those miscuts start to add up, very quickly.
Tight margins are the reality of food processing worldwide. Any opportunity to reduce waste and increase value from raw material is key to staying competitive. While high-speed secondary processing lines are becoming increasingly automated, trained operators still trim small bones or other hard contaminants to ensure product quality and safety.
It’s here that plants are throwing profits onto the cutting room floor.
“We knew there was an issue with wasted product at rework stations,” said Nína Margrét Gísladottír, Global Product Manager, JBT Marel. “But, we also knew it wasn’t a detection issue, the SensorX has been leading the market in poultry detection since 2007 , for a reason.”
Working with customers, we studied the line and the real issue soon became clear.
SensorX was doing its job, detecting bones with reliable accuracy. But piles of fillets entering detection were causing collateral rejects. If one fillet in the clump contained a bone, the whole pile would be redirected to the rework table. Even accurate detection can’t overcome poor infeed presentation.
Operators on trimming lines are under pressure. Portions come fast, and bone removal must be precise.
When five or six fillets hit the rework table at once, operators have no way of knowing which fillet contains bone and, with the line still running, they trim every fillet in the pile; just to be safe.
This negatively affects the bone inspection process.
In some cases, operators, knowing the supervisor is on their way, put untrimmed product back onto the line, to be inspected again and create bottlenecks, resulting in further inefficiencies and increasing quality risk.
If you can regulate the flow of product to ensure singulation before detection, you can dramatically reduce collateral rejects. It’s a small change that makes a huge difference.
Optimally, a production line should only reject contaminated pieces with the majority quickly moving to downstream processes. By singulating product before detection, there is less chance of bottlenecks and minimized waste of valuable raw material.
The Infeed Monitor helps solve the cause of the issue by alerting operators when product is incorrectly positioned on the conveyor. With singulated presentation, the real benefits of the SensorX accuracy really shines.
The Infeed Monitor doesn’t just alert operators, it collects data on product flow. This provides managers and supervisors with line visibility: where, when, and how often overlaps occur, and which shifts experience the most issues. This performance insight enables continuous improvement of line efficiency with actionable solutions such as clear accountability, targeted training, and fast root-cause identification that directly addresses and solves issues.
Loss of valuable raw material in high-speed processing is avoidable. By rethinking where singulation of product occurs in the line, not only do processors optimize downstream processes, but they minimize trim waste and reduce operator error and overwhelm. Which adds up to valuable yield gains and increased profit margins. It's a simple shift that delivers significant gains.
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