Hi all,
Just to give some background, I am in charge of technical at a poultry processing plant. We make raw marinated poultry products this is carried out via vacuum tumbling with all ingredients.
When tumbling is carried out chicken is loaded into the tumbler along with the other ingredients (Water, Seasoning etc) and once tumbling is finished the chicken is decanted from the tumbler into 200L eurobins. After every mix there is always chicken left in the tumbler that we are unable to retrieve manually. The only way to retrieve this chicken is by putting a few buckets of water (Potable water of course) into the tumbler and to carry out a few tumble cycles. The chicken will then come out of the tumbler and be drained off before adding to the original batch.
The issues I have with this:
- If the product is seasoned, potentially could be a quality issue as once the batch of chicken is bagged you may get variances in colour / taste between different bag
- Potential shelf life issues which obviously can be validated through the normal shelf life processes we have
- Is the water classed as a processing aid, even though it is an ingredient in the product? Does anything need to be declared?
- From a food safety / quality standpoint is this viable? Would an auditor see an issue with this if shelf life validation was carried out on a test batch with this process carried out. Would the label still be correct?
It will save the company over £20k a year, so I want to really explore all options before i say they can or cannot do this
Any comments would be much appreciated, happy to provide more info if needed