Animal meal obtained from animal offal offers a fairly complete source of most of the aminoacids required for a balanced animal diet. These products are used to correct nutritional deficiencies of other foodstuffs used in animal feed, such as vegetable feeds. However, animal meal is a good source for microorganism growth during processing or storage. A government regulation proposes that a stage of feed sterilization could be carried out before cooking the animal byproducts (offal, feathers, etc.) or even of the meal itself, considering that if direct saturated steam is used, the minimum temperature should be 133 °C, for a minimum of 20 minutes, or if dry heat is used the meal should be exposed to a dry heat of 140 °C for a minimum of 3 hours. In industry, a final product that meets both the sanitary standards and high protein content is required. In this context, this work aimed to study different strategies for processing meal prepared from byproducts of poultry slaughterhouses, searching for the most effective technique for sterilization: whether pre-digestion or sterilization of the meal itself. Industrial (3,000 kg) and pilot (150 kg) plant tests were carried out. Sterilization on an industrial scale presented a better performance than the pilot plant tests. Protein content increased in all tests and the final digestibility of the meal was approximately 92 per cent, which increases its final market value. The industrial process was effective removing microorganisms, since no count was detected in the meal after any of the tests.
animal byproduct meal; sterilization; poultry by-products
