ABSTRACT
Poultry processing, or what is more commonly referred to as primary processing, is the series of steps that commences with the live bird and encompasses slaughter (killing of animals for food), evisceration, chilling, and marketing of whole, ready-to-cook carcasses. Further processing, or secondary processing, often refers to portioning of the carcass into parts and deboned meat through product formulation, further processing, and cooking. A modern broiler processing plant is highly automated, with constantly evolving mechanization to reduce manual labor. Pronounced differences exist between plants in terms of how specific operations are accomplished. The following description is a composite of a generic plant, with the emphasis on the operations and not on how they are specifically performed.
