The market for thigh fillet is opening up, offering plenty of opportunities worldwide. To benefit fully from this development, poultry processors can process thighs by using Marel's inline Thigh Fillet System.
Marel has developed a globally unique inline thigh deboning concept, which can handle high speed lines. The Marel solution can produce deboned thigh meat of high yield and quality with minimal trim operators or inspectors required. The system can keep up with the highest hourly throughputs while processing thighs with utmost precision and consistency.
In some countries, mainly in the Far East, chicken thigh meat has always been more popular than breast fillet. But nowadays, there’s a global trend to upscale thigh meat, especially for its taste. It’s not just the big market in China, where thigh deboning equipment is almost a standard facility in every processing plant. Scandinavia also has a large appetite for thigh fillets, while Latin American markets love thigh meat products too. In the USA and Russia thigh products are appreciated more and more.
In parts of the world where thigh meat is popular, the Thigh Fillet System will be fully operative in a plant’s double shift operation. Other poultry processors, operating in markets where breast fillet still leads, now have the option of processing fresh thighs up to the required capacity, turning boneless thigh meat into a high value product.
The deboning technique, which mimics the work of a skilled manual operator, ensures “butcher quality” thigh meat. It is a worry-free solution and is easy to adjust. The processor can choose which thigh products he wants to debone with easy control of production orders.
Manual shackling or rehanging is no longer necessary, as the process remains completely inline after the cut-up process. Thanks to the stable, optimized process, an absolute minimum of operators are needed to check and trim. Therefore the inline concept saves considerable labor.
It is the task of the thigh deboning system to preserve the quality of the supplied anatomic legs throughout the deboning process. That’s why bone handling is very gentle and far from being "aggressive". Putting too much pressure on the bone to get it out could mean the loss of a carefully harvested oyster and thus loss of quality, which is exactly what Marel wants to prevent. So the thigh bone is never subjected to excessive forces. Instead, this system uses a unique technique which makes for long-term reliability and low cost of ownership.
Around the knee cap of a chicken leg, there is always valuable meat which usually isn’t harvested. Stork’s new thigh filleting system succeeds in efficiently adding the knee joint meat to the higher value thigh meat. A maximum of meat from around the knee is harvested without putting undue stress on the drumstick. What pops out – automatically and reliably, without any human labor needed - is a bare knee cap. In the thigh meat virtually no knee cap nor any bone remnants will be left behind.
Marel's system produces thigh fillet with high yield and with minimal loss of valuable meat. Thigh fillets now can have a maximum amount of meat attached, with almost no losses, damage or bone remnants. Meat is smooth without roughness or raggedness. Product presentation – natural or marinated – is truly first class and is eminently suitable for retail sale.
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