Fish processing has come a long way in the past 10 years or so, moving rapidly from labour-intensive operations to state-of-the-art components and total solution turn-key plants that have greatly increased quality, yield, capacity and speed. In conjunction with these advances, overweight and salvage have been reduced to a minimum. On the leading edge of this revolution in innovation is Marel, the well-known Iceland-based company that over the past 18 years has expanded and extended its scope from the upper reaches of the North Atlantic to processing plants around the globe.
The newest addition to Marel's saga of success in turn-key innovation is Sudurlax in the Faeroe Islands, a recently opened salmon processing plant designed by Marel. Carnitech, a Marel subsidiary, along with Formula.fo and Nomatech, supplied some equipment and assisted with installation. Contracted to design a highly specialised, total solution for a duel-line plant, Marel assigned several teams of designers, managers and technicians to the task.
'The outcome was as planned,' reported project manager Jóhannes Sveinsson, 'a highly efficient operation producing IQF vacuum-packed salmon fillets and portions, which has the flexibility to implement other production requirements as needed. From infeed and gutting to portioning, batching and packing, we quite simply -- so to speak -- handed over a fully tailor-designed and equipped factory ready to go into production."
A key component of Marel's total-solution capability is the linking of all operations to Marel's MPS software and M3000 controllers. Together, this dynamic duo has given managers and operators a completely new level of supervision and control. The system micro-monitors individual components, while at the same time macro-monitoring the entire operation. "This includes being capable of integrating data from scores of processing lines simultaneously, while at the same time creating individual reports for each line, each machine and each operator," said Jóhannes.
Step by Step
The processing plant is operated in connection with its new slaughterhouse that was completely renovated in record time by the locals. After slaughtering, salmon are transported to Marel's new automatic grading and infeed system,'which significantly increases throughput, yield and productivity by being able to achieve a high level of precision,' commented project consultant Arnbjörn Eythórsson. He added that a single worker easily operates three gutting machines.
From there the salmon go to the packing grader where they can be selected and boxed in a head-to-tail configuration according to a pre-determined target pack weight, transported to a whole-fish freezer, or sent along to Marel's 3rd generation salmon flowline after going through a Carnitech pinbone machine.
