The escalating global demand for poultry products, coupled with the challenges of securing personnel for the often arduous tasks in poultry processing plants, has underscored the urgent need for automation in this sector. The inherent variability and delicate nature of poultry products, like chicken fillets, pose significant hurdles for traditional automation solutions. This research seeks to address this challenge by employing simulation-aided design to develop an automated solution for singulating and orienting chicken fillets. The study investigates existing technologies in poultry and other food industries and develops a practice-oriented Discrete Element Method (DEM) model to simulate chicken fillet behaviour. The model's efficacy is validated through a series of tests, including damping, bending, sliding, sensitivity analyses and real-life experiments. The insights gained from these simulations inform the design of an automated solution, which is then iteratively refined and visualised in the DEM software. The proposed solution successfully demonstrates the potential of simulation-assisted design to automate complex tasks within the poultry processing industry, paving the way for increased efficiency, productivity, and reduced reliance on manual labour. The research also underscores the importance of considering the unique characteristics of poultry products in developing effective automation solutions, highlighting the need for further exploration into advanced modelling techniques and material and interfacing equipment behaviour analysis.