Primary poultry processing won’t be the same anymore with the introduction of Marel’s VC-i. Until now, vent-cutting performance relied mostly on operator skills to adjust the settings, but the VC-i requires no human intervention or assessment at all. Designed to optimize hygiene, efficiency, and automation, the VC-i eliminates manual adjustments and ensures precise, contamination-free vent cutting. With PUPIL AI-powered vision technology, this intelligent system monitors performance at the highest speeds.
In the primary poultry process, it’s the vent cutter’s job to drill out the cloaca without damaging the intestines and hang it over the back of the carcass. Vent cutting is the first operation inside the product, which should be done with surgical precision and hygiene; the remaining operations in the evisceration line cannot correct any mistakes.
The Marel VC-i vent cutter sets a new benchmark in accuracy by meticulously drilling out the cloaca without touching the intestines, thereby preventing any soiling or contamination. This precision is driven by PUPIL ((Precision Unified Processing with Intelligent Learning) AI vision technology, which provides real-time insight into the machine’s performance, ensuring that cloacas are extracted and positioned correctly.
Automated settings
The ease of use of the VC-i is emphasized by the HMI touchscreen, which allows users to set the VC-i on-the-fly with a few taps. Pre-defined recipes are controlling the automatic machine settings to achieve optimal parameters, such as drill depth and product positioning, for the incoming flock. Thanks to these digital machine settings, manual adjustments based on guesswork are a thing of the past. At current high line speeds of 15,000 bph, the human eye can no longer assess vent cutting quality—that’s where PUPIL comes in to monitor performance visually. By eliminating human error, the VC-i ensures consistent, high-quality results, even when bird weights and sizes vary significantly within a flock. Together, the automated adjustments and PUPIL AI monitoring maintain high performance across all shifts and flocks, even with wide weight ranges.
Internal SmartBase software contributes to VC-i’s consistency by monitoring the machine’s health in real time. It offers early warning alerts on performance at both machine level and unit level, enabling proactive adjustments and maintenance.
Superior hygiene
Hygiene is at the core of the VC-i design, where any soiling or contamination is strictly unacceptable. The open structure of the 20 newly developed, robust carousel units not only reduces wear and tear, but also residue buildup and contamination risk, while offering enhanced cleanability. After each operation, the individual drill units are thoroughly cleaned by their own spray washers. They are switched off to save water usage when the smart product detection system identifies empty shackles. The VC-i’s vacuum system also adds to hygiene by removing initial feces from the intestines, preventing soiling of the clean process and contamination in downstream processes.
