Processing salmon efficiently and effectively is an increasingly important aspect of the industry as evidenced by the fact that about 200 executives from almost 100 salmon-processing companies took time off to attend the 10th annual Marel Salmon ShowHow in Denmark in early February.
As the name suggests, the one-day event provided the opportunity to see ongoing demonstrations of a wide range of the latest salmon-processing equipment and to talk to engineers about operating it. Product-development specialists were also on hand to discuss equipment that had not even been launched yet.
Marel is one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of seafood-processing equipment. The company says that from the outset it has aimed to enable processors to achieve the “Holy Trinity” of maximising yields, quality and throughput.
In recent years, fish processors in Europe, North America and elsewhere have been turning increasingly to China and the Far East in an effort to drive down labor costs, said Jón Birgir Gunnarsson, Marel’s fish industry division general manager.
This, however, is a pattern that may be about to change, he added: “Increasing yield, quality and throughput are key factors when it comes to offering viable alternatives to fish producers currently outsourcing to geographically distant locations. While it’s easy to be good in one of these if you’re ready to sacrifice the other two, getting the right balance is much harder.”
Reducing labor by eliminating repetitive manual tasks with safe and hygienic automated solutions is the goal of Baader, another leading fish processing equipment manufacturer. However, Baader agrees that it is getting “more and more important to improve the yield, the efficiency and to get better product out of the raw material.”
Nowhere is this more so than in salmon processing. During the salmon crisis in Chile, the other salmon-farming and -processing nations needed to step into this gap, said Robert Focke, managing director for sales and marketing at Baader. “They needed to increase their production and their efficiency,” he noted.
Baader has developed what it calls its “Salmon Solution,” combining a high yield head cutter with a new sophisticated filleting machine, a fully automated trimming machine, a final control unit, and weighing and grading units.
Marel also offers complete salmon-processing lines. At the showhow, it linked up a filleting line including deicing, manual de-heading, de-sliming, filleting, manual active trimming line, fillet divider and vacuum pin boning.
Both Marel and Baader set great store on the computer monitoring of all stages of processing, so that managers can instantly measure the efficiency of the various operations. Marel claims that its Innova software provides the complete IT solution for the modern salmon processor to optimize profits and overall production performance.
“Innova covers the complete value chain in the production cycle, from reception of supplies to product dispatch, providing all key performance indicators for each stage and traceability from door to door,” said Marel’s Jón Birgir Gunnarsson. “Innova provides maximum flexibility from small operations to plant-wide systems.”
Baader also seeks to supply its customers “with all real-time key results for each stage with full traceability, giving the manager the possibility to make necessary real time adjustments to optimize yield, quality and throughput.”
In the future, Baader aims to cover the whole value-added chain from getting the raw material into the production, to packaging and labeling “while our software is monitoring the whole process and makes it possible to optimize the customers’ profits and overall performance of the production.”
All this is a far cry from the days when salmon was sold as whole fish or cut into chunks and canned. Today, processors are being asked to supply tailor-made, supermarket-ready portions or to process the fish into an increasing array of value-added products. They are, therefore, seeking to utilize the fish to its maximum potential.
