Brazilian meat plants are more automatized
Brazil's poultry industry has increased investments made in automated lines for primary and secondary processing processes without the need for human touching of the products, from live bird shackling to packaging, announced Marel. Even before COVID-19, an increasing number of processing plants around the world were already facing difficulties in hiring employees for their processing lines. "The human factor is the weakest link in the process. Once the pandemic is over, we expect that the trend towards automation continues. In a scenario like this, certain manual operations become difficult to be done efficiently and within certain required standards, which makes automation attractive from an economic point of view and for quality too,” says Ruud Berkers, Sales Director of Marel for Latin America.
Processing plants often feature fairly cold halls with many employees working close to each other, shoulder to shoulder. To allow social distancing, according to Ruud Berkers, the manual processes would need to occupy twice the space or the processing plants would operate with only half of its capacity in the existing space. “Both situations negatively influence the production efficiency. So, whenever possible, automation will be an obvious answer to the challenges, in addition to the greater hygiene of the automated process, since human hands no longer touch products,” he explained.
Hygiene also plays a special role in the investment decisions made by meat processors, along with traceability and improved performance of automated processing machines. As consumers today are extremely demanding concerning top quality, presentation of cuts, food safety and product traceability, they have much to gain from automated processes.
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