Apparatus for breaking animal carcasses and handling meat products

摘要

An integrated facility for breaking dressed animal carcassas includes a continuous flow of the carcasses and their subdivisions through a series of processing areas where the carcasses are broken into primal cuts, the primal cuts are further divided, boned and trimmed along processing lines designated for particular primal cuts, the secondary cuts thus produced are then trimmed and boned as necessary, packaged and sorted according to their weight. Groups of the secondary cuts are placed in boxes which carry machine-readable markings which indicate the box contents. The filled receptacles are carried by a common conveyor to an area where they are sorted into groups according to the machine-readable markings, palletized by groups and placed on unidirectional refrigerated storage conveyors. Orders for products are filled by discharging the pallets from their respective storage conveyors, depalletizing the goods and routing the boxes to designated transport vehicles. A constant inventory of boxed products is maintained by automatically reading the markings on the boxes and weighing the boxes both before and after they pass through the storage conveyors.