Information
In Chinese and Asian markets the chicken neck is a high-value product. It is eaten in many different ways, on a skewer, as a snack, as street food, or as part of a dish. When cutting up a chicken carcass, attention should be paid to the careful harvesting of the whole neck. It should be as long as possible, but without damage to valuable pieces of breast skin and meat, and without breast contamination from crop skin or crop fat.
Harvesting
In the evisceration process, chicken necks are cracked, trachea and esophagus having already been removed. In the cut-up department, the process is completed by harvesting the neck as a consumer product. The Marel Neck Cutter HY achieves optimal neck yield and enhances breast skin quality. It can even benefit wing cutting quality. And what is more, it does all this while saving labor. There’s no longer any need for an additional worker to remove manually any residual crop skin or crop fat in the downstream breast deboning line.
Effective cutting
Product guides position the necks before they enter the cutting unit and bend away the wings to prevent them from being cut. Thanks to an ingenuous pulling transport mechanism, the Neck Cutter HY cuts the neck extremely effectively, carefully and tidily at exactly the right location to make it as long as possible. The module uses a non-aggressive, spring-loaded chain that adapts to every weight and size. Rotating blades then sever the neck from the product.
Neck length and breast skin
All the above Marel technologies give an additional 30mm [1.2“] neck length. However, length is not everything. The neck cutter has to find a compromise between a long neck cut - up to the scapula bone - and breast skin quality. The Marel Neck Cutter HY gives processors the opportunity of adjusting settings to their individual preferences.