On 13 June 2015, a record 108 guests from 43 companies came to GEA’s Wuqing factory in China for the Slice & Pack and Homestyle & Bone-in Poultry applications seminar. GEA’s seminars have a strong reputation worldwide as an ideal way to gain hands-on experience, and this one was particularly ground-breaking as it addressed two distinct groups of customers: processed poultry products producers and producers of sliced and packaged products. To cover this diverse group, two parallel sessions were held. With the product and applications experts from European GEA sites providing the applications and equipment expertise, and local GEA personnel providing simultaneous translations, language barriers were easily overcome.
Bringing homestyle products into Chinese homes
As Chinese consumers look beyond their established culinary traditions for ways of preparing food, there is a growing demand from food producers for know-how. One such trend is homestyle chicken, a crispy breaded poultry product that in the past has been difficult to reproduce authentically on an industrial scale. Fortunately, the recently introduced GEA MultiDrum coating solution re-creates the bite, texture and taste of homestyle cooking, and the demonstration of this machine was one of the seminar highlights. Not only does this machine capture authentic homestyle cooking, but it also reduces the manpower needed to operate the line.