The minimisation of giveaway and underweight in poultry proportioning process

Abstract

Food processing organisations are always looking for ways to reduce their operational cost without sacrificing their product safety or quality. One of the critical processes in food industry is the final portion cutting and packaging. If not optimised properly, the portion cutting and packaging process of poultry results in large quantities of unaccounted giveaways or underweight packages leading into profit loss. This paper utilises the DMAIC Six Sigma approach to minimise giveaway and underweight simultaneously for one of the large-scale poultry organisations in UAE. A manual sorting process is implemented and resulted in a giveaway reduction from 9.7% to 4.81% while an automated sorting machine is expected to decrease it further to 0.80%. The results can be scaled to other food organisations regardless of the company size and demonstrates the effectiveness of Six Sigma approach to reduce waste while complying with quality and governmental standards.