Reducing bacteria load in poultry with micro droplets water: A process hurdle approach

Poultry processing is all about managing the technology and various processing steps in your production. In every single process step hygiene is an important aspect to produce the best possible product quality. For many processors this is challenging.

In poultry processing, product hygiene determines pathogen presence and shelf life. Many times visible (faecal) contaminations or crop and feed residues remain undetected or are only considered to be a minor issue. These visible contaminations however, often contain (pathogen) bacteria. And it is for this reason why the European Union enforces a 0-tolerance on visible contaminations at the end of the evisceration line for the whole product (so both inside and outside).

Another argument for a 0-tolerance on visible contaminations is the use of immersion chiller baths. In the EU often the drag through immersion chillers, and outside EU often the 'spin chiller' type. Visible dirt and bacteria are collected in the chiller bath water and very often causing quality and shelf life issues by cross contaminations. For this reason, the water needs to be refreshed at high volumes or chemicals are added to the chiller water.

The other constraint for EU poultry processors is that no processing aids or disinfection methods are allowed. Processors can only use fresh potable water to meet the EU's food safety requirements and regulations that enforce the absence of many pathogens in fresh poultry meat.

To meet all requirements and keep product hygiene and quality at a high standard hygiene hurdles can be implemented. Hygiene hurdles must be implemented after each process step -especially in poultry processing- and starts in the defeathering department all the way up until the cut up department. Only inside / outside washing at the end of the evisceration dept. cannot remove all dirt and pathogens.

Each cleaning step is a hurdle that prevents dirt and bacteria to pass on to the next step in the production process. Every hurdle is an individual washing step that is specifically designed to remove the contaminations of the previous processing step.Why multiple hurdles are essential:

1. dirt and bacteria start drying and quickly start to fixate themselves.
2. faeces and bile contaminations leads to discolouration that is a reason for rejection under EU regulations
3. a better hygiene is achieved using less water

All these hurdles are working together and form an extremely powerful and effective deep cleaning process, going from hurdle to hurdle improving and ensuring your product hygiene.

Over the last 25 years Innovative Water Concepts (IWC-International) has developed a hurdle process approach based on high velocity micro droplets of water. Our innovative Undine? technology creates microdroplets at an extremely high velocity by mixing water and compressed air. This technology makes the water so effective, it uses up to 70% less water compared to standard OEM solutions. And because these micro droplets are similar sized as many pathogen bacteria, the microdroplets are able to:

1. reach bacteria deep inside cavities or skin and
2. remove bacteria by collision without
3. damaging the product

Because it only cleans the specific area that contains contaminations, the hurdle approach is much more effective. In praxis we often see that the inside / outside washer at the end of the line needs to fix all hygiene issues and needs to ensure a clean product using extremely high volumes of water applied to the product with still a very poor result, compared to a single step washer.

We'd love to meet face to face either live or online to share results and discuss what we can achieve in your process. Contact Twan Koenen or Ton Winters and we'll get in touch with you.

?We are "Cleaning the Impossible"

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