"What do your bone in chicken/turkey half breasts look like?" or
"Are most bone in half breasts cut of center on purpose?"
The reason for the question is:
It seems like Foster Farms cuts their bone in chicken half breasts off center. They are not genuine half breasts. They are 53% of a breast having most of the keel bone instead of just half of it. Also, more than half of the wish bone. There's two obvious reasons for this. 1: It makes boning the other side easier. So a lot of the time/labor is saved. A breast gets split. The big "half" is sold bone in, the other "half" is sold boneless. Is that how they do it, or am I too suspicious?
2: you get more $$ for all that extra bone. With all the thousands of pounds of chicken Foster Farms sells, that extra piece of bone probably adds up to a lot.
BTW, we cut our own breasts. We even remove the keel bone and then split it exactly in the middle. Our bone in half breasts have no keel bone.
They could be doing the old A&P style of the late 60's, 70's where you tilted the bird over so you took off more on one side than the other, the reason for this was we cut ALL parts, this left all the back on one side, we took the other side for choice parts and would bone out a lot of the breasts. the other side we either quartered or halved with one or two giblets packs under the halves. I would take three halves and cut them up for a chicken & half cut ups with three giblet packs, that caught on with a lot of cutters till one of our " Meat Gods " said that could bring some ethical issues. Bad thing about him stopping us was I couldn't keep the damn things in the case, I sold the hell out of them. So after much deep thought how to shrew him, I did the same thing but put them out as family pac mixed fryer parts ( wink ) By the way back then we didn't get extra parts except whole breasts, If we didn't cut them we didn't have them. It was nothing to cut 25 cases a day from Thur to Sun back then. An some " Meat Gods " wanted you to cut them with a knife only, For a long time I was the only cutter in Atlanta to have his own boneless blade and it went with me every where I did, One " God " told me that wasn't a knife but the union back me and he got off my A**
I think it's a little dishonest what Foster Farms is doing. If you bought some breasts and they are cut off center, but you get both sides, it would be OK. But for them ALL to be the big side, something's not right.
Some whole turkey breasts are labeled "with attachments". You get a breast, lots of skin from the neck area, maybe even some of the neck, almost all of the back (minus a tiny sliver) and even a little bit of boneless wing. Not an honest breast, however, since they say "with attachments" then I guess it's a little misleading, but not illegal.
BUT: The Foster Farms half breast thing is just wrong. I say it's like cheating on the tare. Cheating a few hundredths of a pound on every package they sell.
"What do your bone in chicken/turkey half breasts look like?" or
"Are most bone in half breasts cut of center on purpose?"
The reason for the question is:
It seems like Foster Farms cuts their bone in chicken half breasts off center. They are not genuine half breasts. They are 53% of a breast having most of the keel bone instead of just half of it. Also, more than half of the wish bone. There's two obvious reasons for this. 1: It makes boning the other side easier. So a lot of the time/labor is saved. A breast gets split. The big "half" is sold bone in, the other "half" is sold boneless. Is that how they do it, or am I too suspicious?
2: you get more $$ for all that extra bone. With all the thousands of pounds of chicken Foster Farms sells, that extra piece of bone probably adds up to a lot.
BTW, we cut our own breasts. We even remove the keel bone and then split it exactly in the middle. Our bone in half breasts have no keel bone.
I'm guessing you are exactly right. I worked for a company early in my career who did precisely that. They had us cut bucket of chik that was one and a half chickens but we had to cut three chickens off center to make each bucket of chik. Each one had a lot of bone and the other halves had very little bone and were separated and sold for more $$. That large company had a lot of rip off policies that caught up to them and they went under. Mighty observant of you.
