How to Choose the Right Chicken Plucker

Choosing a chicken plucker, sometimes called a defeathering machine or chicken picker, can be a daunting task. Bigger is not always better and buying on price alone could cost your business more money later.

The best advice is to match plucker capacity to scalder capacity. For example, if your scalder is capable of 5 chickens, then you want a plucker that comfortably plucks five chickens.

Pluckers work because the birds tumble against each and roll 360 degrees against the plucker fingers, which is what removes the feathers. If you have too few birds in the plucker, the pluck time increases and the pluck quality may go down.

If you must mismatch plucker capacity, make sure your scalder has more capacity than your plucker. In other words, if your scalder can do 8 chickens, it’s ok to buy a plucker that can only reasonably handle 4 chickens. Why? Because you would simply scald fewer chickens at one time. The scalder doesn’t care if you scald few birds at a time.

Chicken capacity per Poultry Man plucker based on a typical market age meat bird:

• Poultry Man 23” plucker: 2-4 chickens
• Poultry Man 27” plucker: 4-6 chickens; 1-2 turkeys
• Poultry Man 35″ plucker: up to 16 chickens; 3+ turkeys

These capacities are guidelines. Size and body shape of the birds you’re plucking will also influence the capacity. As a general rule of thumb, longer body birds (think ducks) and larger volume birds (think turkeys) do well in larger diameter pluckers.

View all Poultry Man chicken pluckers.

How Many Turkeys?

Turkeys work you and your equipment hard. They have big bodies that don’t work well in a small plucker.

If you plan to process turkeys, you’re looking at a Poultry Man 27” or 35” plucker. The 23” plucker is too small for turkeys.

A 27” plucker will handle one tom or two hens at a time. You’ll need to remove the feet prior to scalding and plucking. If you only pluck one at a time, the turkey may not tumble well, so you’ll have to help the birds tumble.

If your turkey season consists of plucking 150 or less in a few times a year for Thanksgiving, the 27” plucker will work. We used a 27″ plucker to process thousands of birds in the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving when we operated our mobile processing trailer.

A 35” plucker will comfortably start with three or four turkeys. If you’re processing thousands of turkeys a year or need to do several hundred in one day, the large 35” drum size will handle more birds at a time and do a great job plucking them. The caveat is that you need a scalder that has enough capacity to match the plucker.

Door or No Door?

Poultry Man pluckers are available with or without a door. Our drum plucker is loaded from the top, which means when the plucking cycle is done, the birds must be picked up and unloaded from the top of the plucker. A plucker door allows the birds to be automatically unloaded onto a receiving table. As the plucker turns, the operator opens the door, and the birds will exit through the door onto a table.

Do you need that? The short answer is no. You can pluck chickens, turkeys, ducks and other poultry without a door. However, there are benefits to a door:

• Reduce the handling of the birds. Beneficial with turkeys, large chickens, or large daily processing volumes.
• Easily move birds from the kill floor to the clean side of your processing facility without touching them with the included receiving table.
• The included receiving table provides a space for birds to “stack up” coming out of the plucker creating a natural buffer instead of a bottleneck between the plucker and your evisceration stations.
• Allows the plucker to continuously run (do not need to turn on/off to load/unload birds)
• The Poultry Man door is operated with a mechanical latch to provide functionality without future maintenance. Timed door latches are destined to fail.

The Poultry Man plucker with door is available in the following models:

• Poultry Man 27″ Plucker w/ Door and Receiving Table
• Poultry Man 25″ Plucker w/ Door and Receiving Table

Note the receiving table is not optional when you get a plucker with a door. The receiving table fits to the contour of the plucker and has raised side rails to ensure the birds stay on the table.

Plucker Design and Build Quality

Poultry Man pluckers are fabricated and assembled by hand in Pennsylvania. When you purchase a commercial chicken plucker from The Bird Nerd, you are supporting multiple American businesses.

List of distinguishing features on a Poultry Man chicken plucker:

• 304 grade stainless steel construction (drum and legs)
• Heavy duty 14-gauge stainless drum
• Direct drive using a motor and gearbox
• Off the shelf parts

304 Stainless Steel

304 stainless steel is the industry standard material for food applications. No inspector anywhere knocked a processing plant for using 304 grade stainless steel. It’s easy to clean, durable, and corrosion resistant.

Not all stainless steel is the same. There are many imported (and assembled in the U.S.) pluckers that use a real shiny, thin gauge 403 or 203 stainless steel. This stainless may shine but it’s thin, lower quality, and less corrosion resistant.

14 Gauge Stainless Construction

This is Poultry Man’s signature approach. Durability. They are built to last and take daily use.

The quality difference is easily seen and felt compared to a plastic drum plucker or a chicken plucker that uses a thin 20 or 22 gauge 403 stainless.

Direct Drive Power

The Poultry Man pluckers use a direct drive motor with a gearbox to reduce the speed. These pluckers are powerful and designed to work. A Poultry Man 27″ plucker easily handles 40 pounds of chicken; The drum diameter is the biggest limiting factor. A 35″ plucker can easily tumble more than a hundred pounds

There are many Poultry Man 35″ pluckers that are used to dehair suckling and young pigs.

Off-the-Shelf Parts

A Poultry Man chicken plucker uses off-the-shelf parts. You can literally find the bearings, the motor, etc. from common supply sources. Nearly anyone can work on them.

110 Volt Power

All Poultry Man pluckers are designed to run off a standard U.S. 110-volt power source. This gives our machines a wide variety of applications from homesteads to small slaughter plants. Poultry Man pluckers run optimally as designed, and our experience is that you will not receive any “efficiencies” by “upgrading” your plucker power source to 220.

Budget

Spending thousands of dollars on a chicken plucker feels like a significant investment, and it is. Eli Reiff, the founder of Poultry Man, started to build and ship pluckers in the early 2000s. He also used the machines he built in his own custom slaughter shop in central Pennsylvania.  From day one, Poultry Man pluckers were built to stand up to the rigors of daily use and were relied upon to generate cashflow for the processor.

When considered from this context, a Poultry Man plucker is the most competitively priced commercial chicken plucker you’ll find on the market while still being affordable for a wide range of processors.