Meat+Poultry - September 2022 - 24

POULTRY PROCESSING
50 different ways, they are a handheld eating
experience and they taste amazing, " Hart said.
MEETING DEMAND
Wayne Farms' new dedicated chicken wing
processing line at its 116,000-square-foot
Decatur West Prepared Foods plant in
Alabama has allowed the company to focus
on expanding its production of a variety of
pre-cooked, bone-in wings for a growing
number of foodservice customers. The latest
addition is the 10th production line in that
plant, and it added about 80 employees.
Wings produced on Line 51 are precooked,
either roasted or steamed and products include
breaded, non-breaded and buffalo style. In a
recent tour of the new facility, the plant was
producing steam-cooked wings for foodservice
at a capacity of about 13,000 lbs per hour.
Prior to the addition of Line 51, production
Wayne-Sanderson Farms
recently renovated about
18,000 square feet of its
Decatur West Prepared
Foods plant as part of a
$26 million project to create
a dedicated line producing
pre-cooked chicken wings.
of Wayne-Sanderson wings was being shared
by three other lines, mostly on Line 53 at the
company's Decatur West facility. About half of
the entire Decatur complex's 1,000 workers are
assigned to positions in its Decatur West plant.
The adjacently located Decatur East facility
is 114,000 square feet. A cold storage facility
is situated between the two operations. The
Decatur complex includes the East and West
plants that produce chicken-based items for
foodservice and retail customers with offerings
that include cooked, par-fried, marinated, sous
vide, frozen and sausage products. The complex
also houses the Wayne-Sanderson Farms
Customer Innovation Center, a research and
development culinary facility that includes a test
kitchen that is equipped with commercial-grade
kitchen equipment.
DEDICATED TO WINGS
" We decided we would consolidate that volume
because we had additional volume that was
being commercialized and requested from
customers, and that would have put us over
capacity on Line 53 for wings, " said Heath Loyd,
senior director of Decatur Prepared Foods.
Once the decision was made to add Line 51,
that freed up Lines 52 and 53 to process more
breaded and boneless chicken wing items,
although at a lower volume.
" The Line 51 decision had arms with
multiple angles to benefit customers and
streamline the production, " Loyd said.
To keep up with demand, two FPEC
tumblers with a capacity of 10,000 lbs each are
positioned just above the staging area of the
line. For the company's roasted, steam-cooked
chicken wings, the tumblers incorporate a
marinade into the products.
After tumbling products are conveyed
to a JBT-Stein, twin-drum oven, which has
a capacity of 18,000 lbs per hour. For the
steam-cooked products, the dwell time is
approximately 17 minutes at temperatures
24 MEAT+POULTRY | 09.22 | www.meatpoultry.com
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Meat+Poultry - September 2022

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