Case Studies

“When Samherji took over the operations here, the freezing plant was transformed and we installed Marel’s most state-of-the-art processing system at the time. You could say that we upgraded this system with a new processing line in the summer of 2005. It’s a telling statistic that the throughput per employee was 12-14kg before the changeover in 1997, compared with an expected average of up to 40kg per head when the current upgrading phase is complete,” says Gunnar Adalbjörnsson, Production Manager at Samherji’s fish processing plant in Dalvík. This plant is at the forefront of seafood-processing technology in Iceland, which is among the world-leading countries in the field. The company’s management and other staff have for years collaborated very effectively with Marel on various innovative development of fish-processing technology. The partnership will continue, as Gunnar says there is always room for improvement in this line of business.

Gunnar Adalbjörnsson, Production Manager at Samherji’s fish processing plant in Dalvík.

Scale controls traffic

The Dalvík plant’s new Marel processing system is one-fifth larger than its predecessor, i.e. it has 24 trimming stations compared with 20 previously. It has a double flowline, with the trimming operators always receiving the fillets from the same side. Weighing of both the product and cut-offs is carried out at each trimming table, and the operators each receive instant feedback on their respective throughput and yield on their display monitors. Three channels extend from the trimming stations: one to fresh-fish exports, another to the plant’s main freezer and the third to X-ray bone detection in tails. The scale controls the system’s traffic and determines the route for individual fish pieces. This latest configuration includes a new vision grader from Marel, which sorts the fish by weight and the length of the pieces. While the previous grader sorted only by weight, the addition of grading by length significantly expands the range of processing possibilities.

“An average of 70 fillets pass through the new system each minute, and throughput has jumped by up to 20%. Our throughput used to be 43-45 tonnes per day, but after the new processing line arrived, our average throughput climbed to 55 tonnes a day in July, and in fact exceeded 60 tonnes a day four times,” says the Production Manager. A total of about 10,000 tonnes of fish were processed by Samherji in Dalvík in 2004, and the projection for this year is approximately 12,000 tonnes.

1% in yield = ISK 55 million!

“Obviously, when the production has reached this level, each percentage point in yield becomes more valuable. For us, one per cent in yield equals about 55 million Icelandic krónur, which shows clearly that there’s much to be gained from increased efficiency in this respect. We’ve managed to elicit more value from the catch using Marel’s technology. For example, our yield for cod used to range between 30 and 40 per cent, but has now exceeded 50 per cent. Among other things, we’ve collaborated with Marel on the development of automatic fillet-deboning technology. When this technology is brought into use, the yield will rise still further,” says Gunnar Adalbjörnsson.

Gunnar was honoured on the Great Fish Day in Dalvík in 2004 for his contribution to the fish industry in the town as well as his leadership in building up Samherji’s local fish processing plant. The citation accompanying the honour acknowledged that, through his work, Gunnar has contributed to the development of the fish industry in the whole of Iceland.