I work in a chicken factory. AMA!

[AintNobodyHereButUsChickens]

Anything you might’ve wanted to know about what really goes on in a chicken processing factory I might be able to tell you! (I’ve only been there 6 weeks so I don’t know EVERYTHING. But I know a bit!)

Do the chickens suffer much during the killing process? Have you seen male chicks getting minced in an incinerator?

The chickens are gassed. They stay in their plastic crates and the crates are put into a gas chamber. There is minimal stress to them.

No, I’ve never seen that, we don’t have an incinerator for one thing. And the mincer is in the part of the factory where I work. No chicks come through, male or female.

Where does the meat in your factory go? What’s it used for? Very interesting thread thank you.

My partner had been unemployed for some time and wasn’t really making too much of an effort to get a job. The job centre sent him to work in a frozen chicken factory. He worked through the night in the cold , with colleagues who on the whole didn’t speak English. I actually felt sorry for him but it certainly gave him the push he needed to find other work! All credit to you op for taking the job .

Good for you OP! You sound very focused and with a good sense of humour and lovely clear writing style too.

Getting stuck in to any job you can during these difficult times, showing up consistently on time every day, following instructions, diligently doing your job, taking on any extra roles you can see need doing even if it's just emptying the staff room bin that's always overflowing, and working as a great team member with a nice bunch of people will stand you in excellent stead for any job in the future. Really impressive!

If the chicken is old and tough, where does it get sold/to whom (roughly)?

Legs, wings and breast meat are all graded. We look for things like tumours, machine damage from the cutters, excessive bruising which causes the meat to turn an impressive shade of lime green, broken/dislocated bones or mis-cuts (where the machine has sliced off the wing in the wrong place instead of on the joint). Grade A legs and wings go abroad to countries in Asia, Africa etc. Grade B wings go for pet food, legs and breasts are either Grade A or Cat3, there is no Grade B for legs or breasts. (Cat3 is waste and gets taken away by a by-products company). Cat3 wings are the ones with excessive bruising, or they’re excessively bloody, and any with green patches.

Whole birds are sometimes ordered by hotels and restaurants, they aren’t graded at all. They all get packed in the boxes, tumours and all. I’m not really sure why we don’t grade full birds because some of them can get pretty gross. I found a tumour on a leg last week that was the size of an egg!

I’m not sure where the breast meat goes, I’ve never seen breeder sized breasts in any supermarket here so maybe they get sent abroad too 🧐

Fun fact, we also make the filling for nuggets, pies, hotdogs etc 💀

Most of our workforce is actually English speaking! We do have some with very little English but everyone rubs along together just fine! Most people are absolutely lovely, which certainly helps with the day. There almost always someone willing to give you a helping hand with anything you’re struggling with! It’s a surprisingly friendly environment tbh.

I’m not sure there’s minimal stress. For sure, the electric water bath method where chickens were hung upside down by their legs was very stressful but gassing is no cake walk either. It’s allowed the word ‘humane’ to creep into discourse, which means ‘higher welfare standards’ to the consumer but stress is not minimal at all. I think it’s important to acknowledge there is no easy way to kill animals for food.

Well no of course it Is stressful for them being put in those crates and driven to us, then waiting around etc. But being gassed in their crates is a lot less stressful for them than the old way of shackling them by the feet.

What do you do in an average shift? Like what tasks?

I'm very interested to know more but I'm struggling to think of questions!

This is the most interesting thread I've seen on mumsnet in yonks! Thanks OP!

Honestly no two shifts are the same! There are so many different tasks you can do. Due to the repetitive nature of the job, you’re supposed to rotate to do 3 different tasks per day. There are an incredible amount of different components to getting chicken in, killed, butchered and packed! I’ll go through it all in a mo. It’ll take a while to describe it though!

For example, one day I can turn up and on the first session I’ll be packing wings. This consists of scooping wings out of a metal tray using your arms, into a plastic bag lined box. You scoop until you think it’s about 10kg, weigh it and add/take some out if it’s not quite right, fold the bag over, put the lid on, pop it through the banding machine and move on to the next one (the banding machine has a conveyor belt which carries it away). This all should be done in less than 20 seconds. You can easily shift over a tonne of wings in one packing session! I do it for 3 hours until lunchtime.

Then after lunch I might be on grading wings. This will absolutely make you seasick if you’re not careful! The belt is like a flexible plastic grid so you can see through it. Do NOT stare at the belt, look only at the wings! You spend 2-3hrs sorting through and picking out the bad wings and letting the good ones carry on, to where the packer packs them.

Session 3 is often spent in butchery, trimming breast meat (ripping off the skin, cutting out tumours/bones/excess fat) and chucking them onto a conveyor belt where they travel along to where a group of graders check they’re done to a good enough standard. If they are, then they carry on and are packed. If they’re not, they’re put back into the system where they go round again and are re-trimmed.

No worries! I’ve always been curious to know what happened in the chicken factory, so my eyes were on stalks when I went for my tour 🤣

What's the risk of salmonella etc? How do you protect yourself?

Right then, the full process of butchering chickens! This will be long, as there are a surprising amount of steps and I’m also a bit of an over explainer…

The chickens arrive on lorries in plastic crates, the crates are placed in the gas chamber and the birds are gassed. Once they are dead, they are removed from the crates and hung by the feet on the shackles. They are checked, and if they survived being gassed, they are dispatched by hand and then disposed of as waste. We’re not allowed to process chickens that have been killed by hand.

They travel along in the shackles and go through a blade that slits their throats and then they bleed out which takes approx 90 seconds, there is a person standing by at all times to make sure they’re bleeding properly. After this, they get dipped into boiling water, this opens up the pores to allow the feathers to come out easier.

I never saw where the plucking happens so I’m not sure exactly how that’s done. But after they’re plucked, they go into EV (evisceration) where the feet, heads and innards are removed (but plenty get missed, we always end up with random hearts, livers, stomachs and the occasional head etc travelling along still attached to the chicken after they get into the factory!). Necks are also supposed to be removed but we get a lot of those through too!
After EV they go through two chillers, a water chiller and a blast chiller (actually there might be a third but I can’t think what it’s called!)

And then they arrive in the factory. The first thing that happens is, they go through a set of blades that slices off the wings which drop to a belt below, then a blade that slices part of the way under the breasts to start to separate them from the legs. Then another blade that fully separates the body from the legs, then the legs (which are still joined at the hip) go through one last blade that splits them, they’re then pushed off the shackles by a metal bar and they drop to another belt below.

The wings travel along a belt where they’re graded and packed, same for the legs. The body (which is now just a torso) travels along another belt where they are picked off and sat on cones (called the cone line), where the breast meat is sliced off by hand by the cutters. 4 people, 2 doing right sides and 2 doing lefts. Each cutter has a table to the side of them where they place the breasts, a trimmer stands at each table and rips off the skin, trims all the bad bits off and chucks them onto yet another belt where they travel along and get graded.

The empty carcass is then lifted off the cones by two bars where it falls down onto yet ANOTHER belt where the skin is also chucked, (there are SO MANY conveyor belts!) where it all travels along and is sent into a giant mincer where it’s ground down into… nugget/hotdog/pie etc fillings.

I THINK this is everything! I’m not sure if this is odd or not, but the factory where all of this happens (after the chillers) doesn’t really smell bad. It smells vaguely of sweaty feet but I’m not sure if that’s the chicken or from all the people in wellies 🤣

Well, on my induction day the man doing it did say it’s a high possibility that we’d get ‘ill’ in our first few weeks. Thankfully this hasn’t happened!

Our birds are end-of-career egg layers and they’re vaccinated against salmonella, I’m not sure exactly how it works but I was never warned about salmonella tbh.

As for protection, we wear a tonne of PPE. Wellies (green), white coat, hard hat and hairnet, beard net if you have a beard, ear protection, disposable apron, warm fabric gloves and latex gloves x2 pairs (even with the fabric gloves your hands get bloody cold so everyone layers up on latex gloves!). I always give my face a good wash when I get home because it’s inevitable you’ll get splashed with chicken juice at some point in the day. I wash my hands at least 10 times while I’m there 🤣 You have to wash in/out each time you go in/out of the factory!
Toilet
Wash in
Wash out
Toilet
Wash in
Wash out
Toilet
Wash in
Wash out
Toilet
🤣

Op just wanted to say I respect the grind. You're doing it and making the best of it and you should be proud of yourself.

Good for you. We all want our food and just expect it to magically appear. I actually just said to DH tonight that we’d had chicken at every meal this week!

Thank you, @OP. The most informative AMA I've read.

Two questions, if you have time.

When I was a student I spent a few months in Leningrad and we were horrified to be give chicken with green bits one time. Do you happen to know whether the green discoloration is supposed to survive the cooking process?

My late husband worked in a slaughterhouse for a summer and it put him off tripe for life. Has working in the chicken factory put you off eating any products?

Do they not panic and fight to get out at the last minute once they realise (as humans in gas chambers reportedly do).

Well, whenever we get wings with green patches, they go into the waste. So I’m not sure about what it’s supposed to do when cooked! Although if we get breast meat with green, it’s generally leftover crop and that’s just sliced off. The crop is kind of an extra pocket a chicken has where they store food to digest later. I’m not sure what would happen to the crop if cooked 🤔 I imagine it would smell disgusting though, it’s bad enough when it’s ‘raw’, it smells like grass that’s been vomited back up so it’s all mixed with bile too.

Surprisingly, no! Cheap and nasty chicken kievs are still one of my favourite things even though I know what the meat in them actually is 🤣

Thank you @AintNobodyHereButUsChickens . We didn't eat our green chicken...

Agree this is a very interesting thread, thank you @AintNobodyHereButUsChickens

Umm, well, our chickens are what you call ‘spent hens’ that are disposed of via us, when their laying career is over. Their eggs are a big “free range” brand but I’ve seen the state of the hens when they come in on the lorries. A lot of them have bald undercarriages and pale combs. They do not look very happy.

Might these particular eggs reach the shelves in yellow cartons?

We’re not allowed to process chickens that have been killed by hand

Why is this? Is it so the factory / retailers can say that all chickens are humanely gassed?

It sounds very physical work, has the job had an effect on your fitness or weight?