To further enhance quality assessments of its Mowi brand smoked salmon, Mowi Consumer Products UK has implemented new Maritech Eye to provide real-time hyperspectral scanning of its fillets.
According to Norway-headquartered seafood tech company Maritech Systems AS, its Maritech Eye’s advanced algorithms and hyperspectral camera solution detect and document blemishes within a fish fillet and the size location of these quality challenges.
This quality assessment method is the only one of its kind in the world, it is done at industrial speed, and live data is provided to operators and management, Maritech said.
In 2018, producer Mowi, Maritech, and the Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture Research (Nofima) began a joint innovation project to develop a technology for real-time quality scanning of salmon fillets at industrial speed.
The project was successful, and Maritech Eye was launched for redfish at Aqua Nor in August 2021.
Following the project, Mowi Consumer Products UK and Maritech then co-operated in a short pilot period to establish the quality criteria and make the necessary adjustments to integrate Maritech Eye within the production environment.
“For our business here in the UK and in particular the Mowi brand, this gives us the ability to pre-select fillets based on a specification to reduce the manual intervention of removing blemishes once the fillets have been sliced. Furthermore, sorting by quality and providing objective information gives us the ability to allocate the material accordingly and allows us to utilise our resources more efficiently and effectively,” said Gary Paterson, Head of Operations, Mowi CP UK.
Per Alfred Holte, Vice-President Technical Solutions in Maritech, explained that Mowi Consumer Products UK is one of three international Maritech Eye redfish projects being delivered.
Holte also highlighted that because of travel difficulties caused by the COVID-19 crisis, the Maritech team was only able to visit Mowi’s site in Scotland once last year after the initial physical installation of the equipment.
Nevertheless, Mowi’s subsequent handling of the solution’s development and implementation was impressive, he said.
“Together we have proved that most of the optimisation and implementation process can be done remotely and that Maritech Eye is ready for the global seafood industry, even during a pandemic,” he said.
