Advances in broiler processing and process control [VIDEO]

Learn about new broiler processing equipment exhibited by JBT Marel at IPPE 2025.

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Transcript
Transcript

Welcome to this episode of Watt Poultry Chat. We're coming to you from IPPE 2025. My name is Terrence O'Keefe, and I'm the content director for WATT Global Media. With me today at the JBT Marel booth is Jay Russell, who's the North American Sales Director for JBT Marel.

Jay, I understand that your company is debuting several new products at IPPE. Can you tell us about them?

Yeah, thanks, Terrence. We're debuting quite a bit of technology this year. I think three of the main components we'd like to highlight for poultry is, one, our ATHENA Breast Deboner, which we finally are bringing to market at 100 cap a minute capacity, and integrated conveyance technology for simulation of product for downstream processing.

The other one is the VC-i. It's a vent cutter that utilizes artificial intelligence to track vent performance across flock variants of inbound birds. So we're using a little bit of different technology to get the insights needed that haven't necessarily been tracked.

I think the last one is the RoboPacker that we have that's designed for the US market. We're already the dominant leader for robotic packing, but what we've done here is taken out some of the global functionality to make a US and North America ready machine to scale it down, but to keep the flow rate at a high capacity. So it's a machine designed for this market with less of the bells and whistles of fixed weight, and it's more focused on a pick-and-place environment.

All right, the vent cutters really got my head spinning because I'm trying to imagine, when I think of AI, I think of a camera, and how does that stay clean on an evis line?

Right. And steam and everything. Right, and that's, yeah, that'll be the biggest question we have, but it's contained in an environment to where it's protected. And they've done, you know, it's not like it's new. It hasn't been running at several plants, going through the cleaning cycles and all that.

But with that, there's a lighted technology to where you have a camera with a backup light, and we've had to train it to kind of disassociate the vent and how it hangs on the bird versus the bird naturally. So over the course of the time, you start to see how the flock variance affects the vent performance, which then helps from a food safety environmental sequel and all the guts contaminant potential that it could have.

Can you tell us a little more about the ATHENA Breast Deboner and what makes it different from prior offerings? Yeah, sure.

We've worked diligently over the past couple of years and to look at what's missing in the market in regard to functionality from a breast deboning standpoint. What comes off of the machine is standard in terms of fillets, tenders, butterflies, the standard offering of what the execution needs to produce. What's different about it now is the way we can track inbound product. We could track the performance and the efficiency of the modules. The various bird weights can be adapted in real time.

And then of course the yield tracking. And with that, we've also integrated conveyance technology to where as the product comes off the machine, it's simulated, prepared for downstream function, whether that's bone detection, sizing, sorting, packing. So it's looked at in a way to save labor as it integrates into the next phase of the process.

Well, thanks a lot, Jay. This WATT Poultry Chat is brought to you by JBT Marel, a leader in delivering innovative poultry processing solutions.

Learn more at JBTMarel.com and thanks for joining us for this episode.

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