The story of Amir Quality Meats is one of a great entrepreneurial journey. What started out as a small butcher shop in the early 1990s has grown to be one of Canada’s largest independent processors and distributors of zabiha halal meats. The proudly Muslim-owned and operated company now processes close to 30 million kilograms of finished products annually, and employs between 350 and 400 people across its two processing facilities in Brampton, Ont. and slaughterhouse in Arthur, Ont.

“In the early ’90s, my grandfather, Mohammed Ayubeally, started a business selling and distributing meat across the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) region.

“Over time, he found a requirement for halal meat niche and went fully into the distribution sector.

“He was working with various suppliers and various abattoirs to get them to produce more halal products,” recalls Amir Quality Meats director of operations Adam Aziz.

That business operated for two decades before Adam’s mother, Sherry Aziz, joined the company and identified an opportunity in the halal market to create value-added products processing the meat in addition to distribution.

“In 2010, she founded Amir Quality Meats with the vision to bring higher quality standards with food-safety programs and value-added products,” Aziz says.

The company started out in a 3,000-square-foot provincially licenced facility in Brampton. A few years later, it expanded to two 3,000-square-foot provincially licensed facilities.

In 2018, Amir Quality Meats expanded again and grew its operation to a 20,000-square-foot facility that is SQF-certified, CFIA-licensed, and Manna Halal Inspection and Certification-validated.

“This allowed the company to expand its reach with the federal certification enabling us to sell and distribute products across Canada,” says Aziz.

“While we currently don’t engage heavily in exporting, there is significant potential to explore international markets as well.”

One of the company’s processing facilities focuses on the food-service industry, supplying raw, marinated poultry that is packaged and boxed and distributed across Canada to various food-service distributors such as Sysco and Gordon Food Service.

The second processing facility is heavily focused on tray packing for retail customers.

When the company started, it was processing multiple proteins—including chicken, beef and lamb—but now Amir Quality Meats focuses entirely on chicken products.

“As the company continued to grow, and in order to focus on food safety and quality, the segregation of multiple proteins became challenging,” Aziz explains.

“It was a strategic decision to focus on chicken,” he says.

“That demand was always growing, but it was also done to adhere to the highest levels of food safety.”

Competing with other large meat processing companies means that having the highest food quality standards is vital, according to Aziz.

“The largest companies have that, so we strive to be at least the same or better, where possible,” Aziz states.

“We must give customers the assurance and reason that we are the right choice for them to make.”

The biggest challenge for Amir Quality Meats continues to be the labour shortages affecting the industry.

“The more you can do to allow your process to be resilient of the labour challenges, the better,” Aziz notes. “I think the whole industry is facing that.

“Meat, specifically, is a tough industry to recruit people and maintain employees. The turnover rate is higher than average.”

To address labour shortages, Amir Quality Meats automates processes wherever possible.

To enhance processing capacity, the company purchased a BAADER 656 automatic chicken deboner and a John Bean Technologies (JBT)’s DSI Waterjet Portioning System, which significantly increased its production capabilities.

 

The company was aware that by installing an automatic poultry deboning and portioning systems it would require state-of-the-art X-ray inspection equipment to ensure that bones are not being missed and sent out to market in their products.

“We knew when we put in an automated breast deboner that we would need automated inspection of the boneless products, because the inspection would eventually become a bottleneck,” Aziz says.

To assist with this vital aspect of quality control, Amir Quality Meats reached out to PLAN Automation and purchased an Eagle 400HC (highly cleanable) X-ray system, equipped with PXT Photon Counting Technology and a reject management system designed to handle a wide variety of poultry products.

“Your percentage of bone contaminants coming out of a deboner is typically going to be anywhere from 10 to 30 per cent, but I’ve seen as high as 50 per cent,” explains Mat Bédard, vice-president and chief operations officer at PLAN Automation.

“I’ve been in the business for over two decades now: if you have an automatic deboner, you need an X-ray system.”

As Bédard recalls, Amir Quality Meats visited PLAN Automation at its headquarters in Bolton, Ont., to watch a demonstration of the Eagle PXT Photon Counting Technology in action.

“When they came to us, they were onboard,” Bédard says. “They needed to be more efficient for bone detection.

“They knew this was what they were looking for, and then they had to go out there and find the best vendor for their X-ray system,” Bédard says.

Most chickens that are used in meat processing facilities are grown for only six to eight weeks. This can create complications for some bone detection systems.

“The problem that you have with a chicken that’s only six to eight weeks is it doesn’t have a lot of time for the bones to calcify,” Bédard explains.

“Without the calcification, you don’t have a lot of mineralization in the bone and, due to the age of the bird, you don’t have a lot of density in the bone either.

“This makes the bone very difficult to detect.”

As Bédard relates, Eagle Product Inspection has extensive experience in addressing challenges related to X-ray detection technologies.

The company has been designing X-ray systems since the 1990s, and brought the first dual-energy MDX (material discrimination X-ray) to the food and beverage market in 2005.

The Eagle PXT Photon Counting technology is especially designed for the poultry processing sector. It offers an innovative solution that combines an automated product reject management system with the Eagle 400HC or 400 RMI X-ray inspection systems for raw and unpackaged products.

The Eagle 400HC incorporates Dual-Energy Performance X-ray technology (PXT) that detects low-density foreign materials and the smallest bone fragments in the industry. It uses photon-counting to detect bones of low calcification—ensuring superior quality control.

“Poultry bones are particularly challenging to detect because the bones of commodity broiler chickens are low in density and low in calcification,” Aziz relates. “So traditional, single-energy X-ray inspection doesn’t detect poultry bones particularly well.

“However, PLAN Automation, through the X-ray machine that they supply, is able to detect those low-calcification and low-density poultry bones to get down to a very high level of Probability of Detection (POD),” Aziz says.

“In order to maintain the highest levels of quality, it was important to us to be able to detect the smallest bone, so that there’s no chance of boneless product going out with bone in it.”

Since 2019, Eagle and PLAN Automation have installed over 400 PXT Photon Counting systems globally.

The Eagle X-Ray technology supports standard market deboning throughput lines with single-, dual- and quad-lane capacity, processing up to 120 pieces per minute per lane.

Engineered to meet strict poultry industry standards, it has a robust construction and an IP69 safety rating.

The unit incorporates unobstructed sightlines, open shapes, and contoured surfaces to minimize potential food harborage areas.

This design eliminates the need for curtains, as well as fasteners, in the product zone for improved food safety hygiene.

The unit also features the Eagle SimulTask PRO operating system, which combines powerful image processing routines with simple touchscreen operation to deliver maximum inspection results for hard-to-detect contaminants.

“It’s a phenomenal technology,” Bédard extols. “We’re utilizing our advanced PXT Photon Counting detector combined with our highly customizable image analysis software.”

As Bédard points out, he Eagle PXT Photon Counting X-ray system can detect chicken bones below one millimeter in size at a false reject rate of less than one per cent.

“There’s no other production lines out there that can go as fast as this,” Bédard says. “We can go single lane across the conveyor all the way to four lanes across the conveyor up to 480 pieces per minute.”

With such high processing speed, the reject system must be as efficient as the deboner and X-ray technologies to prevent production bottlenecks.

“The challenge is that if you’re processing 50 birds a minute, you’re going to have 100 thighs and 100 breasts per minute,” Bédard explains.

“So if you have a 20 per cent rejection rate, you have to reject 20 breasts per minute.

“You can’t have a standard rejection mechanism and dump those into a bin, because every two or three minutes that bin is going to be full,” Bédard states.

“It’s going to be very difficult for you to rework that product.”

To address this issue, PLAN Automation installed a re-circulation station for Amir Quality Meats.

When the X-ray system scans the chicken pieces and identifies pieces with bones, it rejects them and recirculates the pieces via a conveyor to four operator stations.

The operators then rework the meat, manually inspecting for any remaining bone contaminants and removing them.

That meat is then placed back into the production flow to be reinspected.

“The X-ray will reinspect the same piece multiple times, because if there were three bones in the piece of meat and the operator only removed one, it’s going to come back over and over until all the bones are removed,” Bédard says.

“It was a solution that we thought would give us the high level of quality we were looking for in an efficient way,” adds Aziz, “because you can’t do anything without maintaining quality.

“You can’t compromise on quality, but you also need to also be efficient in order to remain competitive in the market.”

In addition to detecting bone contaminants, the Eagle X-ray detection system can also spot metals from 0.2 mm to 0.4 mm in size, as well as identify aluminum down to one mm, and also detect glass, stones, plastics and rubbers, and other dense or inorganic contaminants.

“It can detect any foreign body that is dense or inorganic in nature,” Bédard says.

In addition to the impressive X-ray technologies offered by Eagle, PLAN Automation is conveniently located in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) region, and it maintains a well-equipped parts and service department.

With more than $3 million in emergency reclaim and rental X-ray equipment, and over $1 million in stocked parts and a team of 65 employees, including 16 technicians, PLAN Automation is well-positioned to provide ongoing support to its customers.

Says Bédard: “That’s something that was quite attractive to Amir Quality Meats: the fact that we had a very large team that was going to be able to support them in the long run.” Bédard says.

According to Aziz, his company’s main competitive strength is rooted in its ability to produce large volumes of product while maintaining a significant degree of flexibility.

“Being in the meat industry, it tends to be fast-paced,” Aziz states.

“So being able to respond to customers’ changing demands quickly on-the-fly, while maintaining the highest levels of quality food safety standards, is what allows us to be competitive,” he says.

“I think that’s the reason that a lot of customers continue to choose us.

“Of course, we’re also able to be competitive on the pricing through efficient production,” he adds.

In addition to automating the processing lines in their two facilities in Brampton, Amir Quality Meats is also in the process of automating various aspects of its slaughterhouse operations.

“We continue to seek out automation wherever possible,” Aziz says. “We want to continue to expand in the markets that we’re in.”

Beyond growth in its existing markets, Amir Quality Meats would like to start producing cooked products in the future.

“We currently work with other facilities to produce some cooked products, but it’s not a core piece of what we do, because everything coming out of our facilities is raw right now,” Aziz says.

“Still, over the next few years we want to explore further is producing more of the cooked products further,” Aziz reiterates.

“Once the slaughter facility expansion in Arthur is complete,” he concludes, “I think we’ll be looking next at expanding our footprint in the cooked meat market, because we have a lot of food-service demand for that.”