Marel will be speaking at the 13th North Atlantic Seafood Forum (NASF)
aquaculture and salmon seminar 7 March to address how technological
advances are rapidly elevating levels of automation in the seafood processing
industry.
These are exciting times for anyone involved in fish processing. The rate and
global spread of increasing automation amounts to a revolution in the industry,
and all of Marel’s core markets – salmon, cod and tilapia – have enjoyed
ground-breaking advances in processing technology in the past 12 months, with
more expected in the year ahead.

TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION
Innovative solutions in both salmon and whitefish will set new industry
standards within the next couple of years, with watershed installations already
underway.
“Consumer demand is driving product quality and diversity to new heights, while
the main driver for higher levels of automation is the reduction in manpower
available, particularly in Europe and North America,” explains Sigurdur Olason,
managing director of Marel Fish. “But it’s the technology and innovation that
delivers practical solutions to this challenge.”

CORE MARKET MILESTONES
A recent example of increased automation in the salmon industry is the
installation of China’s first fully automatic processing line. “Chinese processors
have traditionally been known for a heavily hands-on approach to fish
processing,” says Sigurdur. “So this installation in China highlights the
widespread significance of automation in the global salmon industry.”
As the cod industry looks to innovate and optimize the value chain, pinbone
removal has been automated both on land and on sea, and the first Marel
FleXicut pinbone removal and portioning systems have now been installed on
freezing trawlers as part of a complete modernization of onboard processing.
Marel’s most recent contribution to the revolution of cod processing is the
addition of a new pre-trim solution and packing robots to the FleXicut system.
As Sigurdur explains, “This means that pre-trim can be the last place the fish is
touched by human hands.”
Companies are increasingly prepared to invest in technology to compensate for
a diminishing supply of labor. “In the South American tilapia industry, the desire
to process larger volumes is also pushing automation,” says Sigurdur. “In Brazil,
for example, large Marel poultry customers have started investing heavily in
tilapia processing and volumes are expected to rise exponentially in the coming
years.”

SMARTER PROCESSING

Advances in software contribute greatly to automation in food processing, and
factories are becoming smarter as software becomes an even bigger part of the
production process.
“Interconnected software solutions now control and monitor the whole journey
of fish from the sea to the supermarket,” Sigurdur says. “Furthermore, we are
entering the next industrial revolution as Big Data and deep-learning become an
integral part of state-of-the-art, hi-tech production systems.”