Water absorption process capability analysis by chicken carcasses during precooling

Abstract

Cooling of carcasses using water immersion is the most used process in the poultry industry. In this stage, besides the reduction of temperature, water absorption in the carcasses occurs and, consequently, in the chicken cuts, which are monitored by the companies and supervised by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Supply of Brazil, which establishes water absorption limits. The objective of this work was to evaluate the process capacity analysis tool to analyze the water absorption capacity by chicken carcasses during precooling, based on the absorption indexes obtained on an industrial scale, by the analysis of 720 carcasses. After structural alterations, aiming at greater bubble control and shorter residence time of the chicken carcasses in the cooling system, Cp (process potential index) and Cpk (process performance index) were close to each other (0.82 and 0.81, respectively), indicating that the process is practically centralized and, although it has become smaller than 1, presented a significant improvement over the initial evaluation (cp 0.35 and cpk 0.26).