06/05/2026
We spend a lot of time talking about the huge changes going on at CT Farms Poultry and Meats, but we continue to work on making our mobile processing unit better so that we can better serve our customers.
This season the firat huge change going on was the new trailer. We added 8' of space, a bathroom (I know that one the crew appreciates), all extruded aluminum floors (no more resealin wood floors to prevent soft spots, upgraded tables to keep the people at evisceration cleaner and drier, and the huge change this year we finally are realizing is the addition of the instant hot water heater. Today we were up and processing in under 30 minutes thanks to this piece of equipment. This was always the worst part of the day waiting for our scalder to get to temp.
The last 3 jobs we did, we started to implement a change some of our customers had recommended to us. We have switched from shrink bagging to vacuum sealing with a massive (still 110v though) chamber vac. The Vacmaster VP330 is an absolute BEAST. It draws a lot of juice and we have had to run it off of our generator. It has 3 sealing bars and a deep chamber. Todays job had a lot of smaller packages of cut up parts, so we could often seal 4-5 packages at a time with a 25 second cycle. We could also seal 2-3 whole birds at one time.
Pro's and cons of Heat Shrinking vs Vacuum sealing
Heat shrink bags -
PROS - beautiful whole bird packaging. Very quick once the water is warmed up. Lower equipment cost.
CONS - people are concerned and rightfully so about microplastics. All the air isn't removed (ie inside the birds). If a leak occurs, the packaging hides it. Wet bags are harder to label. Higher bag cost.
Vacuum Sealed packaging
PROS - packaging for cut ups looks much better (no longer ball shaped). All air is removed so that it lasts longer. If the seal is broken, you know it so you can reseal. Lower bag cost.
CONS - Huge up front investment for equipment, bags are less forgiving (shrink bags are stretchy by nature, vac bags arent)
Here are some pics of some of the products.