Poultry packs: pad plus liner combinations that hold on wet birds

Two thousand eight hundred birds an hour come down the line, and every one of them is wet. Not dripping, not purge-heavy like a cut primal, but wet in a way that spreads: a film of water over the whole skin, plus a teaspoon of purge in the cavity. A pad alone handles that for about ninety minutes. A pad with the right liner handles it for a full shift.

The liner is the part people skip. It costs a fraction of the pad and it decides whether the pad works at all, because it changes where the water lands.

Why point loading ruins a good pad

An absorbent sheet takes liquid fastest at the point of contact. That is fine when the liquid is spread across the whole surface, and terrible when it arrives in one spot. A whole bird sits on a small footprint, and the cavity drains to a single low point. The result is a saturated circle the size of a fist, a dry margin, and liquid running off the edge into the tray channel within two hours.

Water does not spread sideways through a dry nonwoven quickly enough to use the rest of the sheet. So a 500 gsm pad behaves like a 150 gsm pad under a bird, and the buyer concludes the pad is poor quality when the layout is the problem. The sheet is fine; it is being asked to work through a teaspoon-sized hole.

Three combinations and where each fits

What works depends on the pack format, not on the species:

• Pad under a perforated liner, bird on top. The liner spreads drip across a wider area and lets it through slowly. Best for whole birds in a tray, and the format that gives the longest time to first free liquid.
• Pad only, bird on a cake mat. Works for small portions where the contact footprint is broad, and for packs sold within a day.
• Pad above and below. Only worth it for gas-flushed packs where the top sheet controls fogging on the film. Costs double and buys little in a simple overwrap.

For cut-up portions, the liner matters less because the pieces distribute weight across the tray. The failure mode there is different: bone ends punching through the pad and tearing it, which puts fibre into the pack.

There is also the water that arrives on the bird itself. A carcass leaving the chiller carries surface moisture from the final wash, and that moisture is clean but plentiful. It dilutes the purge, spreads faster, and soaks the outer margin of the sheet before the purge has moved at all. On a Monday morning after a washdown, packs can look worse than on a Friday for no reason anyone can name.

Checking the pack at the two-hour mark

The number that predicts a complaint is not total absorption. It is time to first free liquid, measured at the lowest corner of the tray. Pull six packs at two hours, tilt each one, and look for a run of liquid. If you see it at two hours on a pack that will sit for five, change the layout rather than the pad grade. Six packs and a tilted tray will tell you more than a month of supplier samples.

A plant we visited had spent three months trialling heavier and heavier sheets. The drip was coming from the cavity, running down one end and pooling under the film at the tray lip. A perforated liner and a 20 mm shift of the pad towards that end fixed it. The heavier sheets went back to the store room.

Poultry is also the species where the pad change interval matters most, because the load is wet from the first minute. Write the interval on the line board in packs, not in hours; the line speed varies and the pads do not. For liner options and grammage against bird size, the polymer grade tables are a better starting point than a general catalogue.