Machines could minimise waste and improve profitability, not to mention banish people’s blood, sweat and tears from chicken factories - but what about jobs?

W hen you sit down and tuck into a chicken curry, the last thing you’ll think about is how that juicy breast fillet was extracted from the bird’s carcass. You’ll probably have heard horror stories about hens being caged inhumanely in battery sheds, and poor health and safety standards leading to salmonella contamination, but not so much about the process of deboning.

The boneless, skinless chicken breast industry is big business. In the US alone, the average person consumes about 20 pounds of fillet per capita; this is expected to rise to 30 pounds by 2030. To meet this demand, it is thought that the industry will need to produce 10bn pounds of fillets annually. The process of deboning requires skilled hands, but the task can be grim and repetitive.

“The line speeds were ridiculous – the employer would expect you to butcher up to 120 chickens an hour, about one every 30 seconds,” says Chris, a former poultry worker from Northumberland, UK, who asked for his full name not to be published. “It was definitely tough on the hands. Because you had to go at such a frantic pace, you would almost certainly make mistakes. Quite a bit of blood and guts would end on the floor.”

The laborious nature of the deboning line led The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to carry out a report last year into the prevalence of medical conditions affecting hands and wrists among workers at a poultry plant in Maryland. Results showed that 76% of employees had some level of damage to the nerves in their hands, while 34% showed signs of carpal tunnel syndrome.

In 2013, the US agricultural department proposed a plan to accelerate line speeds from 140/minute to 175 as part of a new inspection system. The proposal was later dropped due to pressure from lobby groups, who argued that the increase would likely impact workers’ health.

With disability affecting hand movements and employees suffering fatigue from overwork, there are concerns that employees may struggle to meet the industry’s demands in the future. The answer to the problem could be to automate the production line, argues the team behind Cycle, a Norwegian project investigating how to make the food system more sustainable and environmentally friendly.

The team, led by Ekrem Misimi, a research scientist at Sintef, has developed a robot called Gribbot (gribb is Norwegian for vulture). It functions like a human hand, using a gripper tool to separate the fillet from the carcass.

“A robot-based solution can provide more flexible handling. It increases efficiency and profitability by reducing production costs,” says Misimi. “It also can optimise the yield of raw material by maximisng the amount of fillet that goes into the premium product and minimising the amount of meat that remains on the carcass.”

The Gribbot is said to be the first successful example of a machine that can automate the deboning process. However, there have been other attempts, most notably by academics at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), who are coming to the end of a three-year project to build a deboning system. Initial prototypes frustrated the team at GTRI because they found they would sometimes cut too far and bone fragments would end up in the fillet, and sometimes they wouldn’t cut far enough and meat would be left behind.

“In a nutshell, our robotic system avoids bone chips by using force control to distinguish between the meat, skin, tendon and bone,” says project lead Ai-Ping Hu. “And it uses vision sensing to size up a bird to generate a unique cutting path that improves meat yield.”

It all sounds very technical, but Misimi is confident the food industry will head further in this direction over the next five to 10 years, particularly given the rise of 3D technology. Machines will perform more tasks that usually involve “the fantastic dexterity of human hands” and at a faster rate – the mooted figure for the number of chickens a robot could debone is around 1,000-1,500 an hour.

According to Misimi, continued research into improving the dexterity of robotic grippers will also “create a job market and positions in an industry that will be able to attract young people with ICT backgrounds”. But the case for automating the production line could leave manual labourers, like Chris, out of work – does Misimi think that is worth sacrificing?

“The real question is what happens with the food processing industry if we don’t automate,” he argues. “The way I see it is that automation enables food processors (who operate with very small margins) to transform their production so that they can meet new challenges in the future, and simply survive. For me it’s a case of ‘to automate or to perish’.”

The food hub is funded by the Irish Food Board. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled ‘brought to you by’. Find out more here.

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