Grzegorz Borkowski, Commercial Director at Stasin, and Operations Director Łukasz Wiszniewski talk about the growing importance of animal welfare in Poland and how this affects operations in Stasin’s turkey processing plant. Higher wages and higher buying power forced the company to transform production. Automating the evisceration line was one of the first measures that Stasin took to adapt to the changing situation.
“We produce whole turkeys too, but most of our production consists of cut-up. We also handle giblets. Like most Polish companies, all our cut-up is done 100% manually. But we are thinking about automation, because cutting manually requires a lot of skilled labor.
“Finding people is becoming more difficult. Before COVID, it was easier, but now staff has become more expensive due to higher salaries, medical leave and longer holidays. Poland is no longer a low-cost labor country; it’s a welfare state. We do hire some employees from abroad for non-skilled jobs in packaging or warehousing but their turnover is high, and they often return home after a few months. However, for skilled jobs in evisceration and cut-up, 95% of our employees are Polish. Some have been with us from the very beginning.
“We were finding skilled labor increasingly hard to find. That is why we started automation in the evisceration department. This was where we were feeling the most pain. Another major reason was improving quality. The manual evisceration process is very prone both to mistakes and a lack of consistency. Automation gives us superior quality at the same capacity or even higher. It’s a quick win because the return on investment of Marel’s automated evisceration line is very short. With the same bird count and the same number of shifts, we achieved a 20% reduction in the number of people on the line. We used to do two shifts. With automatic evisceration, we can increase the line speed by 30%. If everything goes right, our efficiency will increase even more. Right now we process 2,700 tph [45 tpm] and we can increase to 3,000 [60 tpm]. We even tried mixed-weight turkeys in one flock. It’s very easy to adjust the settings to different-sized birds. So Marel’s evisceration line is very flexible and prepared for 4,000 tph [67 tpm].”
It’s a quick win because the return on investment of Marel’s automated evisceration line is very short.
Grzegorz Borkowski
Commercial Director at Stasin
“This is the first project we’ve done with Marel and we are very happy. We were in touch with Marel six months before the project started and discussed everything in detail. We were very pleased with Marel’s preparation work. We had many visits from Marel’s engineering team, everything was very well prepared, deliveries were on time, people were on time and supervision was very good. The installation and quality of the machinery just exceeded our expectations. Compared to other companies we have worked with, the Marel team did an outstanding job. I would say it is the most professional company that we have ever dealt with. Marel wanted to have everything very well documented and planned in advance to leave no room for errors. We had to give all our information, insights, calculations and exact measurements of the site. We had to do the preparation works three months before the installation, which included changes to the steel construction and piping. Everything had to be in place so that the Marel people could install it quickly in less than a week. We succeeded in achieving this. On the first day of commissioning, we had to adjust to all the new machinery but we had the full support of Marel technicians. The second day was already much better. And then day after day, Marel taught our people and at the end of the training period we were able to get the line fully operational with no problems. This took only a week. That’s because Marel knew exactly what they were doing.”
“We process male and female turkeys. Farmers in our region usually breed female turkeys, as the Polish retail market prefers female turkey meat due to its smaller size, making it more convenient for customers. For Christmas and Easter, all supermarkets sell ‘baby turkeys’. These seasonal hen birds are even smaller than regular ones and require some machines to be by-passed. Marel designed our line to be adaptable to seasonal products, allowing us to process turkeys ranging from 5 to 22 kilos[11-49 lbs].” The Marel solutions in the evisceration line include a VC-10T vent cutter, an Opening Machine, the P-12T eviscerator, TP-T three-point suspension, an inspection station, the MS-90T intestine separator, TP-T head cutter, NIC-12T neck skin inspection machine, FIM-10T final inspection machine and the RW-10T inside/outside washer.
“In general, demand for turkey meat is increasing. Supermarkets started promoting turkey in the late 2000s. Before that, turkey meat was not so popular. The local market in Poland is growing, because we are becoming a rich country. We are already wealthier than Greece or Portugal; people are switching from cheaper to more expensive foods. One of the biggest differences between Poland and Western Europe is a taste for giblets. We don’t process gizzards, hearts and livers for pet food but we sell everything for human consumption. The turkey neck is highly prized in Poland. Neck cutting is still manual, the only manual process in the evisceration line, because we can get better yields. We sell necks to supermarkets at good prices. Polish consumers use turkey wings and necks to make a soup stock, a Polish specialty. We are also seeing pork increasingly replaced by turkey meat in Wiener schnitzels. The most popular turkey meat is minced meat. Consumers mix pork mince with turkey mince, the fastest growing article in Poland. That’s why we will be starting the production of minced meat, schnitzels, cubes and possibly marinated products. We also produce turkey cold cuts, sausages and smoked products. For the Universal Studios theme park in Japan, we produce smoked turkey drumsticks, sold as ‘dinosaur legs’.”
Stasin (Zakład Drobiarski w Stasinie) is a Polish private company. Stasin’s origins date back to 2008, while experience of producing beef and pork products dates back to 1994. Stasin focuses on product quality and the fact that birds are grown locally. Most of the turkeys come from breeder farms near the plant in Stasin, a town 100 km east of Warsaw. “We used to have contract farmers but have now started breeding our own turkeys. We bought a farm in 2022 and we have a new big farm operational since the first quarter of 2024. This allows us to breed part of our poultry needs in-house.”
Company website: stasin.pl
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