Poultry carcasses have to be chilled to reduce their temperatures from approximately 40 to 4 degrees C, which will ensure safe products. Water immersion, water spraying and air blast are the most common methods used for chilling poultry carcasses. In immersion chilling, carcasses are moved through tanks containing a mixture of ice and water. The variables influencing water uptake by carcasses during immersion were investigated in this work. To perform accurate experiments in industrial chillers is difficult and for this reason experiments were performed in a pilot chiller. Poultry carcasses were taken directly from the processing line. The pilot chiller allowed some investigations on the influence of water stirring method and intensity, temperature and hydrostatic pressure on the poultry carcasses water uptake. Also, a mathematical model for water absorption was proposed. The results indicated that water temperature; hydrostatic pressure and water stirring conditions are determinant in the amount of water absorbed by poultry carcasses during immersion cooling. This work generated knowledge and data in a domain with few data available in the literature. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.