I wont touch another chicken burger or chicken nugget from a supermarket again. I used to love those chicken drummers until one day I got a massive bit of bone in one. I felt sick for days just thinking about it.
Same goes for cheap burgers. Only ones I'll touch from the supermarket are Birdseye.
Having just got back from work and read through the stuff I missed, I would like to highlight this one comment to point out a bit of real life for you and maybe to take away some of the mystery of the production of the breaded chicken you eat.
In the factories I work for, we produce Breaded, RTE (Ready To Eat), RTC (Ready to Cook), Whole Muscle, Value and whole bird chicken products. That basically means that as a company we produce anything from a value nugget to a whole organic chicken ready for roasting. In the same factories we produce chicken kievs, dippers and popcorn chicken/pops depending on brand. Infact we even produce the butter pellets which go into the Kievs!
ALL of these products are pretty much for every single major supermarket, brand and retailer. This ranges anywhere from own branded cheap value products for Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury's etc right up to the high end own brand products for the same and the major branded products (BE, KFC, Wimpy etc).
These products all have their own recipes. This recipe is customer driven and drives a product model and specification we work to. These product models in turn drive in a materials requirement based on what we are making on any single day or week. Every ingredient is ordered from a range of customer approved suppliers to go into their product only. The ingredients will never be transferred between customer products unless the supplier and grade is exactly the same and to spec. There is no big stockpile of meat which is just thrown into any old product. Each customer requires certain things on their materials. Get any of it wrong and you wont be selling it to them.
Every ingredient, packaging item, label and item that will touch the produce is inspected at receipt from supplier, re-checked at every step of the production line and depending on recipe is either frozen or chilled (Frozen versus Fresh products). Some customers require fresh only based on their marketing. This means that NO frozen ingredients can go into it. WJA96 has already alluded to DOK (Date of Kill) for meats and this is strictly controlled. Any meat arriving onsite which we cannot use within the DOK of the customer specification is returned to supplier. We order it on a daily basis to exacting amounts to ensure we can deliver quality products for human consumption.
All end products are sampled by in-house technical teams who cook, taste, review and score every product sample. These samples will also be tested micro-biologically for anything that should be there. This happens every hour of every day.
Frozen meats are used for frozen products but do follow the same standards.
As for the above, I can pretty much guarantee that the BE (BirdsEye) products you are eating are made in the same factories as the own brand supermarket ones. BE might have a slightly different recipe to the others but trust me when I say that bone is not included in any of our products (Except those explicitly calling for it eg marinated drumsticks). What you will have had is a one off error which can happen. When you produce any product at great volume it is a given that every so often something gets through. Question to ask is did you file a complaint with the supermarket? These things are taken seriously and every pack on the shelf can be tracked back through the paperwork to the date and time it was produced and in which factory. Infact we can tell you who the operative using packing terminal was if it comes back to us.
Every factory is accountable and if you are not satisfied, ensure that you tell someone. Investigations do happen and it helps everyone improve their production methods.
Anyone wanting to know more about Food Science and Production should really do some reading. Feel free to ask more questions. I, and I am sure WJA96 will answer the best we can but please make sure you leave the media prejudice at the door. It is not like you most likely saw on TV or read in a magazine. Food production is a multi-billion pound industry and it more tightly controlled than you can imagine.
As a little stat for those wanting to gauge the size of food production and chicken use in the UK etc. As a business, the company I work for kills just over 4 million chickens per week (1.3 million in a single factory). We will then process these to produce the stuff you eat everyday. Those 4 million do not cover our meat/flesh requirements and we buy in a lot more.
Anyone think we could manage those numbers without some very big authorities and governing bodies watching over our shoulders? Also remember we are only 1 of the many many business doing this on a daily basis.