Sustainable Poultry Processing Plant

For BAADER, offering state-of-the-art poultry processing means proving solutions that ensure the highest animal and workers’ welfare, the best quality, food safety and biosecurity, maximum production traceability and flexibility resulting in high yield and a customers’ piece of mind.

Green field projects provide the opportunity to integrate those parameters from the design and planning state on in partnership with the customer. In 2018, KPS Food (former QFG) decided to invest in a new greenfield poultry processing plant in Radom, Poland and chose BAADER as their main supplier of this technologically advanced poultry site.

Plant Design addresses animal welfare, labour shortage, quality and optimal bird processing

The plant has been designed with an UniLoad live bird handling system to meet the European Union animal welfare requirements. UniLoad is designed to transfer birds from their “safe” environment at the farm to a high-speed slaughtering line, while minimizing bird stress in all phases of live bird handling. Less bird stress means fewer injuries and costly downgrades.

In the reception system, Controlled Atmosphere Stunning (CAS) has been implemented to ensure a gentle and controlled stunning of the birds prior to slaughter while birds are sitting calmly in their drawers. Again, bird stress is reduced and meat quality maximized.

Labour is, as in many countries worldwide, a challenge in Poland. Poland’s unemployment rate was only 5% in October 2019 and Polish meat processing plants are facing a labour shortage and large employee turnover. As KPS Food increases production and productivity, the company must deal with a strategic labour challenge. The solution has been to implement advanced, automatic processing technologies.

“There is no manual handling of the bird from shackling on the slaughter line until trimming the fillets”, explains Lukasz Tyszka, Regional Sales Director. “This high degree of automation not only addresses the labour shortage, it furthermore increases food safety and shelf life”, he adds.

The automatic breast filleting is distributed on two deboning lines to ensure that the machine set-up meets the front half characteristics. Even flocks with good uniformity will have a bell curve of bird weights outside the optimum range of the deboning equipment.

Though the BAADER Breast Deboner 656 can adjust the tools to each front half being processed, being able to distribute the front halves to specific deboning lines will further improve yield performance. Distribution is based on weight and quality data captured before whole bird packing and cut-up.

Optimizing the use of each bird being processed is a high priority for KPS Foods. This sustainable use of the intake material minimizes the poultry production impact on the globe and increases the poultry processor’s profit.

Animal Welfare as a win-win situation

Optimized use starts with the live bird handling. By taking animal welfare seriously, there is less damage to the live birds and fewer downgrades and waste. Throughout processing, KPS Foods focuses on carcass care, and by capturing weight and quality data after chilling, the value of each bird is optimized by sending it to best-fit downstream processes.

Using the entire bird – with optimal by-product handling

“By-products are an important part of the KPS Food business” says Jarosław Krzyżanowski, CEO, KPS Food. “We are therefore very pleased that the BAADER solutions allow us to optimally use both edible and non-edible giblets. Hearts, livers and gizzards are sold for human consumption, while the rest, together with trimmings, is used for the pet food industry. The chicken feet are sold to China where they are a delicacy that Europeans have yet to discover”, he explains.

Once fully operational, production capacity will reach up to 13,500 birds per hour. The plant together with further investments into hatcheries, breeding’s, feed mixing plant and convenient food production represents one of the biggest investments in the city and provides hundreds of new jobs to the region.

“KPS Food is a good example of how Poultry processors can derive competitive advantages by embracing resource optimization as part of their business” summarizes Tyszka. “Optimizing the value of each live bird while minimizing the resources used through the whole process, is one of our approaches to a sustainable poultry business”.

About KPS Food

For over 20 years, QFG has been an important provider of the highest quality meat products. Family-owned and established in Radom in east central Poland in 2000, the company is specialized in cut-up and further processing of poultry, beef and pork products. From its very beginnings, the company’s focus was on serving high quality convenience products to Polish and other European consumers. Over the years, vertical integration has been a key element in QFG’s business development. An important step towards maximizing the control of the product quality being produced was the establishment of a new poultry processing plant in Radom, Poland. For this project, a separate entity KPS Food - Krzyżanowski Partners has been founded.

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