A new generation of intelligent processing systems is emerging in the USA, promising to improve integration of the processes in the poultry plant. The poultry industry has a long and well documented history of process innovations. These started with shackle line material handling systems, feather pickers and immersion chillers in the 1940s and 1950s, through automatic eviscerating equipment and cut-up machines in the 1960s and 1970s to the introduction of automatic de-boning, portioning and sorting devices, weigh/price labellers, sorters and cooking and freezing systems in the 1980s and 1990s. Plants have drawn on an array of technologies to increase labour efficiency, processing throughput and processing consistency, while extending limited resources to help take on an ever expanding array of value-added activities. These technologies have also sometimes created islands of automation, which proved difficult to automate because of their complexity.
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