Marel helps Swiss firm to debone thighs
The JLR cutting module will be used by the company to debone thighs, and Micarna production manager Alain Deschenaux said the company had high expectations for the equipment.
“If we want to add maximum value to deboned thighs, an accurate cut is extremely important,” he said. Deschenaux added that if cutting results were only average, they could not be improved afterwards, “The bottom line is to leave as little meat as possible on the back and to use the thigh as much as possible,” he explained.
‘Debone an entire flock’
“By deboning a wrongly cut, damaged thigh, we would lose meat yield and productivity. The module must be sufficiently agile to handle both large and small thighs. This is the only way to debone an entire flock. We already noticed that this was the really strong point of the JLR module.”
Eight years ago, Micarna had an overproduction of thighs, which caused it to focus more on deboning them, said Deschenaux. “In eight years we have grown from 8t of boneless leg meat a week to 40t,” he added.
Marel’s JL and JLR anatomic leg-cutting modules were originally developed for use in Japan, where nearly all products are deboned. The module separates the rear half of the poultry into two anatomic legs and a back piece.
With the JLR system, legs are left suspended from the NT shackle for any further operations needed downstream – for example, inline thigh and drumstick deboning or whole leg deboning.
