TABLE OF CONTENTS Poultry, and broilers in particular, are the most widely grown farm animal on earth. Two major challenges face the poultry industry: (1) keeping food safe from human pathogens carried by poultry in small numbers that could multiply, sometimes to dangerous levels, during processing, handling, and meal preparation; and (2) developing environmentally sound, economical waste management facilities. Innovative engineering and refrigeration are a part of the solutions for these issues.
Processing is composed of three major segments:
Dressing, where the birds are placed on moving line, killed, and defeathered.
Eviscerating, where the viscera are removed, the carcass is chilled, and the birds are inspected and graded.
Further processing, where the largest portion of the carcasses are cut up, deboned, and processed into various products. The products are packaged and stored chilled or frozen.
A schematic processing flowsheet is described in Figure 1; equipment layout for the dressing area is given in Figure 2 and for the eviscerating area in Figure 3. The space needed in the production area for the various activities is shown in Figure 4. A modern, highly automated poultry processing plant processes 1 to 3 million birds per week. In the 1970s, a standard U.S. plant was processing 1500 birds per hour (2 shifts, 5 days), or close to 120,000 birds per week. Barbut (2000) describes processing in detail.
