Duck meat is growing steadily in popularity. China is the main producer and accounts for some 70% of annual production volume, which is now well in excess of 4.5 million metric tons. Duck processors around the world are being faced with a shortage of labor. Automation can replace skilled workers at many places in the factory, and should equal or even better exceed the manual results in terms of quality and visual presentation.
Marel itself has been present in the duck sector for many decades. Its takeover of PMJ, a specialist in duck processing equipment, in 2021 has made it even stronger. Marel PMJ is now the only full-line supplier to the poultry processing industry.
Marel PMJ primary and secondary processing systems can handle Pekin, Barbary, Muscovy and Mullard ducks at line speeds of up to 7,000 ducks per hour. They handle product with the utmost care, safeguarding presentation, quality and yield.
As many processed ducks are still sold whole, skin quality is very important. This is particularly true in South-East Asia, where in some 3,000 bph processing plants, more than fifty operators are involved in manual pinning. Further operators are then needed to check skin quality in the secondary process. Automation, therefore, has the potential to save large numbers of people.
Plucking
Marel PMJ offers a wide range of plucking equipment, including Contramatic and drum pluckers. Depending on the task to be performed, Marel PMJ will always specify the most suitable plucker line-up.The Contramatic plucker consists of two counter-rotating drums equipped with long ribbed plucking fingers and, where specified, is always the first machine in a plucking line-up, where it removes most of the feathers leaving a minimum of finishing work to do.
Marel PMJ’s drum plucker can handle a wide variation in duck weights and really comes into its own when skin quality is paramount, as is always the case in South-East Asian processing plants. Drum plucking is in fact a traditional off-line way of inserting birds in a rotating drum where the centrifugal forces combined with the drum walls do the plucking job. It allows for easy adjustments to plucking time, rotation speed and number of products. Marel PMJ keeps drum plucking as much in-line as possible. The only labor required in a Marel PMJ drum plucking line is for reshackling ducks to the processing line after plucking. Everything else happens automatically, resulting in very considerable labor savings.
After plucking, ducks are waxed to remove stubble and down. During wax treatment, ducks can be shackled by both the legs and the head. This is known as three-point suspension. In this situation, a carrousel machine places the head of each duck automatically in the center slot of each shackle. Shackled this way, wax cannot enter the duck’s beak. To ensure sustainability, impurities picked up by the wax during the process are removed and the wax is recycled.
When hourly throughputs reach a certain level, automatic evisceration becomes a realistic proposition. Marel PMJ can offer full automation beginning with vent opening and finishing with inside/outside washing. The Vent Opener makes a hole just big enough for the spoons of the Nuova automatic eviscerator to enter. The Marel PMJ eviscerator removes internal organs cleanly, carefully and hygienically, depositing them in a tray on a synchronized belt. Both organs and the duck carcass, which they have come from, can then be inspected together by a veterinarian.
