16 December 2024

3 minute read

By: TARGAN

Poultry is forecast to be 2024’s fastest-growing protein in the global animal protein market, expected to surpass US$ 375 billion by 2030 with a CAGR of 3.5% from 2023. In such a booming market, optimizing every stage of production is essential to make every second count — and today, each second is like a hot stock on the rise, its value climbing ever higher.

Consequently, stakeholders throughout the broiler production value chain have adopted a mindset of continuous improvement, focusing on refining both the equipment and the overall process. In this context, technology serves as a catalyst for optimizing processes, with automation and artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly abundant across the various stages of production.

At the plant

Although the coronavirus pandemic is thankfully behind us, its after-effects still linger within the poultry processing industry. Plants were one of the workplaces hit by the earliest COVID-19 outbreaks, leading to a great number of skilled workers leaving the workforce. Today’s fiercely competitive landscape, coupled with a worker shortage, poses a significant challenge to business growth, which is essential to meet the rising demand for broiler meat. For maximum efficiency and top carcass quality, businesses must consider flock uniformity. Consistent bird sizes entering the plant can substantially lower production costs and increase yield. Automation presents an opportunity for plants to address labor challenges, including scarcity and retention, by optimizing complex tasks such as evisceration, giblet harvesting, portioning, deboning, and packaging. These technologies perform best when paired with improved flock uniformity, leading to enhanced overall product quality.

Efficient poultry sexing 

Hatcheries have a crucial part to play in poultry processing efficiencies, serving as a vital link in the value chain. Refining operations at this stage, particularly through optimizing the sexing of day-old chicks, has far-reaching benefits.

Uniformity

Automated sex identification systems like WingScan™ by TARGAN demonstrate modern technology’s transformative potential for hatcheries and plants. By accurately identifying bird sex early in the production cycle, producers can implement separate male and female feeding strategies that optimize the growth and uniformity of birds. This approach enables poultry producers to achieve tighter weight and size distribution curves for both males and female birds arriving at the plant.

Yield improvement will increase plant profitability

Uniform bird sizes are critical to maximizing yield and optimizing processing efficiency. Consistency allows for precise calibration of automated systems, enhancing meat recovery and minimizing waste.

• Increased uniformity allows for more precise adjustments in feather-picking equipment, reducing errors and minimizing damage to high-value cuts.
• During evisceration, consistent sizes lower contamination risks by reducing the need for frequent adjustments. Uniformity also ensures consistent cooling times in the chiller, enhancing product quality.
• In secondary processing, which includes cut-up, deboning, and portioning, uniformity optimizes performance and reduces waste in both manual and automated operations past the chiller. A more consistent carcass size increases the accuracy and precision of cuts in manual secondary processing. This advantage is even greater in automated operations, where current equipment performs better with reduced size variability on the line, resulting in improved yield per bird.
• Product planning can be simplified, and order fulfillment boosted, as a result of more predictable bird sizes entering the plant, coupled with more consistent primary and secondary processing performance. This is particularly attractive for plants serving customers with tight product specifications.

These improvements lead to higher yield percentages and greater profitability per bird processed, making uniformity, driven by effective sexing at the hatchery, a key factor in achieving increased financial performance in processing plants.

WingScan^TM by TARGAN

Launched in 2023, TARGAN’s WingScan™ system revolutionizes sex identification at hatcheries using advanced vision systems and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to sex and sort day-old chicks with up to 98% accuracy, processing up to 160,000 chicks per hour. By automating sexing, WingScan™ is unlocking downstream value for poultry producers at the farms and plants. The system enables targeted feeding strategies to enhance bird uniformity, thereby optimizing production planning, increasing yield, and ensuring consistent product quality at processing plants. The downstream impact of implementing WingScan™ in hatcheries significantly boosts profitability at the processing plant by reducing variation and maximizing efficiency.