Native Bird Processing: Tinoo Increases Production While Saving Labour

Yin Ping'an and Zhang Zhengfen started their business applying mainly manual processes and selling live birds at local markets – now they increased their inline poultry production from 4000 to 8000 birds per hour and implemented a flexible, automatic evisceration process that allows them to keep up with demand.

For almost 20 years, Tinoo has specialized in breeding and processing Qingyuan chicken, and as their business grew, Tinoo expanded with other activities along the value chain, such as feed production, food processing, and product sales through supermarkets and e-commerce. What makes their products popular is the tasty, tender meat. Today, their reputation extends beyond the Qingyuan province to Northern provinces and Hong Kong. By 2020, sales reached 40 million birds per year, which makes Tinoo a market leader in native bird processing.

With increased popularity comes labour challenges, which prompted Tinoo to uncover the possibilities of increasing capacity without becoming more dependent on manual labour. “We needed to double production, but at the same time, we had to maintain the good quality. We spend a lot of resources on breeding our birds, and the high quality must be protected through the complete process – all the way to the consumer, who should be able to taste the characteristics of a Qingyuan chicken”, says Mrs Zhang Zhengfen, Chairwoman of Tinoo. “Therefore, we took the time to find the right supplier for the process equipment. For three years, we researched the possibilities and finally decided to cooperate with BAADER due to the high degree of processing flexibility they offer with their solutions. We need to process varying bird sizes and still protect quality.”

The Qingyuan chicken is older, skinnier, and less uniform in shape compared to traditional broilers. The birds are between 100 and 120 days old, their meat is more expensive, and the eggs are harvested. Tinoo processes the birds with head, feet and neck. The vent and opening cuts are extra small to facilitate the traditional trussing method, which implies introducing the legs into the vent opening. The bird characteristics as well as the processing method require a different solution than traditional broiler processing.

The BAADER evisceration solution installed at Tinoo consists of fully automatic venting, opening, evisceration and final inspection. The equipment is adjustable to fit the flock size and the Vent Cutter 192 is equipped with a “quick-change” of blades to adjust the size of the circular cut. The Eviscerator 210 carefully removes the giblet pack and places it on the back of the bird for easy inspection and manual giblet harvesting. The Eviscerator 210 is also equipped with “quick-change” and an extra set of spoons to accommodate the size variations – Tinoo uses a special spoon when processing small birds and entering through an extra narrow vent opening. With this new evisceration line, Tinoo doubled production capacity while halving the number of workers.