Prestage Foods Streamlines Turkey Processing Through Automation

Because the meat hasn’t picked up additional water or additives from being in a bath, air-chilled poultry is considered by many in the industry to be a premium product with superior taste. Also, because the birds come out at less than 40°F, no CO₂ is needed to cool the birds down like those that emerge from a water bath, according to Prestage. This is a particularly timely benefit due to the current widespread CO₂ shortage.

“Using a water bath might mean the turkeys are deboned or cut up warm. It takes a lot of CO₂ or nitrogen to get those birds cooled below 40 within eight hours. If we used water baths, the volume of turkeys we process would require 25 truckloads of CO₂ a week,” Prestage says. “On top of that, meat just debones better when it’s cold, just like fish that’s been on ice.”

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Traceability of individual birds and flocks is another air-chilling advantage, since each shackle can be tracked all the way through the plant. “If you dumped all those birds into a big pool, you could never say a specific turkey went in it at a certain time—it’s impossible,” says George Lehnerer, business unit leader, food and beverage at Gray. “Even in clear water, you wouldn’t be able to identify it. Air chilling offers a lot of advantages in regards to keeping chlorine out of the product, or other additives, as well as traceability.”

As turkeys move out of air chilling, they enter the secondary, deboning phase. This is where automation and the data collection attached to individual shackles offers precise placement on the lines for maximum yield.

“There’s a [turkey] weight identified with each shackle,” Lehnerer says. “When they go to deboning, there’s three lines set for small, medium, and large weights. The Innova system knows the weight of each shackle, and it’ll also know for that day’s production, for example, we only have 5,000 small birds. So, it’ll move some of the medium birds over to keep the small line full. Depending on the weight distribution that day, they’re not suffocating a single line with one weight, they’re actually pushing birds through all three lines automatically.”

Tim Sandberg, project executive at Gray, adds, “By setting [automated deboning] up with a small, medium, and large lines, you get the most amount of yield. There’s only a couple of pounds difference between the small, medium, and large turkeys, but you’ll get all that meat off.”

The Camden plant is a full-harvest facility, which means everything on a turkey is used and processed in some form. Boneless, skinless breast meat is the most valuable, Prestage says, while the plant also processes thighs, wings, drumsticks, turkey necks, giblets, and other cuts for tray pack and specialty products. “We also process for pet food, which is the lowest-end, mechanically separated turkey, but we want our plant to get the highest yield possible out of the main cuts, especially the breast meat,” he says.

Humane harvesting

Moving back to the start of primary processing, live turkeys are brought inside the facility via trucks and transport cages that are automatically loaded onto two intake lines. Prestage Foods wanted to implement what they considered the most humane, stress-free method available to harvest the birds—CO₂ gas stunning inside a Humane Aire controlled atmosphere stunning (CAS) system—that moves the crates through a long, enclosed chamber specialized for turkeys.

Live turkeys entering Prestage Foods’ facility go through a CO2 gas stunning chamber before being harvested, which humanely renders them unconscious.Aaron Hand

“We use about 0.4 lb of CO₂ per head [inside the chamber] and the turkeys just go to sleep,” Prestage explains. “We’re putting them to sleep so the heart keeps beating, and then they’re bled when they’re fully unconscious.”

Having two intake lines for the stunning system is important, he adds. “A lot of [companies] make the mistake of only putting one line on this system, and that becomes a bottleneck for the whole plant. Having two lines makes the whole process more efficient.”

Hygienic by Design

Sanitation is a key design element running through the facility. The primary and secondary processing areas were built to operate separately, with corresponding employee welfare areas serving as a buffer between the two. This eliminates employee cross-traffic (and potential cross-contamination) in those two processing areas, and allows complete sanitation to be performed on one side without having to shut down operations on the other side.

“It’s a very clean layout and design,” explains Prestage. “You want to do your best to separate your primary side from your secondary side. There’s separation because of the [employee] welfare areas, which are common areas and break areas. We have clear separation amongst all our departments.”

Sandberg adds, “When we met with Ron [Prestage, president of Prestage Foods], he said he wanted live harvest to be separated from people and the rest of the plant, and he didn’t want them all taking breaks at the same time. So, there’s designated common areas where employees can go, and they really only come in and out at the same location, which reduces the chance for cross-contamination.”

The pandemic also played a part in designing the building and how employees would interact with it on a daily basis, Sandberg says. Thoughtful additions include workspaces separated by several feet so staff aren’t working closely together; larger break rooms with extra space for people to spread out; the removal of all major doors for restrooms, replaced by switchbacks; and separate entrance and exit doors installed rather than just a single two-way door, which reduces face-to-face contact among workers moving through the plant.

Just outside the facility, a separate parking lot was created for clean cages and trucks, away from the intake area where live turkeys are offloaded. “Most people think cross-contamination only happens inside the plant because everything is vertically integrated,” says Lehnerer. “The trucks are a point of cross-contamination. So, [after unloading], the empty cages come off and get washed, the truck moves forward and gets washed, and then clean cages are put onto a clean trailer in a separate parking lot, and that goes back out to the farm. It’s a whole other way of thinking in the way we added this intervention step to capture the farm side of cross-contamination.”

Food safety is also prevalent for end-of-line tasks at the plant. All turkey products go through metal detection, and all boneless turkey products also go through X-ray to catch any contaminants before being sent to customers for retail sale or further processing.

Leading Labor

As mentioned earlier, the heavy investment in automation at Prestage also has a ripple effect on workforce hours, enabling the industry’s first single-shift, 10-hour, four-day workweek for employees. Primary processing staff work Monday through Thursday, and secondary/deboning workers are there Tuesday through Friday.

“We all thought about how to create an environment at this plant where people actually want to come and work, and doesn’t have, for example, a 50% turnover rate,” Sandberg says. “What is the process for that? One way is telling someone they can make the same amount of money working four days a week instead of five. Prestage can hire people who don’t want to regularly work overtime, nights, and weekends like at other plants.”

Prestage Foods took a closer look at improving the ergonomics for workstations on the line. One solution was to add adjustable height stands—like the worker on the right is using—that can be individually raised to give people the most comfortable position to perform their tasks.Aaron Hand

By emphasizing automation for extremely difficult jobs in the harvesting/primary processing area, Prestage invested in ergonomic equipment, allowing employees to work comfortably and efficiently during their shifts. This includes individual height adjustments on platforms along the line, increased space between workers, and installing machines that do all or most of the work for repetitive jobs like cropping, and live hanging of birds (which can weight 40 to 50 lb each) onto shackles after gas stunning.

“The shackles are lowered down so workers never need to pick up the bird to hang it by its feet,” Sandberg explains. “There were so many areas like that where we focused on automated solutions to the hardest, most labor-intensive jobs.”

A key automation feature in primary processing at Prestage Foods has eliminated the need to lift heavy turkeys onto shackles. The new equipment lowers the shackles so line workers only need to place the feet into shackles.Aaron Hand

Another difficult task taken over by automation is the transportation of giblets, hearts, and livers after evisceration. Prestage installed a fully automated line using conveyors and vacuums to move those innards to another processing area without staff having to manually move totes of the product, limiting their contact with it.

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The employee welfare areas, like break rooms and the central cafeteria, were designed with extra space for staff to relax and recharge before going back to work. The cafeteria was originally developed with a full-service kitchen in mind, but Prestage opted not to install foodservice equipment since staff are only there four days a week, and just three days where all 300 primary and secondary workers are onsite together. However, Prestage kept the overall square footage of the space intact.

“It’s a very nice, wide-open cafeteria,” Lehnerer says. “We see a lot of [Gray’s] customers successfully using self-service vending machines in their cafeteria spaces with a lot more people, so that’s what Prestage has here.” In addition to the vending machines, Prestage also brings in caterers and food trucks on occasion to give workers additional variety for their lunches.

Looking toward the future and possible expansion of operations around the Camden plant, Prestage has right of first refusal on every part of the industrial park surrounding the facility, so that option is available. For now though, the pluck shown by Prestage to take a chance on a new operating model for the turkey industry that addresses automation and labor in novel ways is poised to pay off for years to come.

“If someone tells us our ideas are not possible, I don’t want them part of the team,” says Ron Prestage, president of Prestage Foods. “There’s nobody in the world that has a plant like this for turkey. It might not have been easy to plan and execute, but we figured it out, and there’s very few things I would have done differently.”