Cutting up chicken wings for fast food

Chicken wings—spiced, marinated, or just as they come—are an ideal fast food meal component, perfect for on-the-go eating or as a TV snack

To cut such QSR wings efficiently and consistently accurately, Marel offers a wide range of precision tools. 

Anatomic or not

The small size of the wing segments makes the accuracy of the cuts more difficult. Usually, wing cuts are anatomical, not splitting any bone. Such wing processing demands precise, high-yield cuts exactly between the two joints. Non-anatomic cuts, as preferred by certain QSR chains, have other interests to serve.

Weighing and quality grading

QSR wing products must be of a given size and without blemish. Carcass weight, wing quality and customer order usually determine which wing products are made from which carcass. For most fast-food applications, the cut between drumette and mid-wing joints must be done accurately and anatomically. Marel’s ACM wing cutting modules ensure repeatable accurate cutting at high speed. Marel’s WingMaster is a flexible module, providing a precise anatomic wing cut with perfect skin coverage for mid-wing as well as drumette. The result is an excellent wing presentation with higher yield.

Breast meat attached

Most QSR restaurant chains, however, like their wings harvested with a rosette of breast meat (aka silver dollar). When cutting up carcasses for the famous QSR 9-piece chicken buckets, all pieces must have similar weights, taking the same amount of time to fry. Logically, none of the 9-piece cuts is anatomic, resulting in unique wing, breast, thigh and drumstick cuts. Marel can provide the perfect wing cutting module to achieve this silver dollar cut, as part of the QSR-approved ACM Convenience Food line.

Wings further processed

Most QSR wings are marinated. From the ACM cut-up system, wings can be fed automatically to ValueDrum for marinating to produce high-quality Hot Wings or Buffalo Wings. For homestyle wings, the flouring, battering and breading processes can also be done with Marel solutions, such as the RevoCrumb or RevoBreader.

Boneless wings

A relatively new item on the fast-food menu is the boneless wing, a popular product in the Americas that isn’t a wing at all. They are portioned pieces of whole-muscle breast meat cut into the shape of chicken wing, as opposed to chicken nuggets made from ground meats. Thus, their processing is entirely different, taking place in the deboned breast meat department with the help of an I-Cut 122 portion cutter.