Since FleXicut Salmon was installed in 2017 at their processing facility in Bremnes, Norway, Bremnes Seashore has been involved in a development project with Marel to optimize the solution. The results from Bremnes are excellent and Marel released FleXicut Salmon for sale earlier this year.
Bremnes Seashore is renowned for the high quality of its salmon products, with the company’s SALMA brand among the best known and most highly regarded brands in Norway. It’s no surprise then that the company is the first salmon producer in the world to trial automatic pinbone removal with FleXicut Salmon – a solution designed to raise the quality of salmon products and optimize fillet utilization while reducing labor costs.
FleXicut Salmon cuts the pinbones from pre-rigor salmon fillets to create bone-free, high-value products. It uses X-ray vision to locate even the very fine end of pinbones and ensures minimum yield loss by adjusting the water-jet cutting angle to remove bones according to their precise location each time.
Automatic pin-boning reduces manual handling, reduces labor costs and speeds up production. As Arvid Husa, Production Developer at Bremnes, explains, “The machine has saved on labor costs even more than we had anticipated, so we’re saving two more operators than we expected.”
“The speed is valuable because it means the entire factory is running faster, so we’re getting more out of the other operators too. It raises our maximum capacity,” he says. “Throughput is 10-15% greater, and FleXicut is not the bottleneck.”
Throughput at Bremnes was already high, because they had a very big manual line, so Husa expects that the impact of FleXicut for many other salmon operators would be even greater: “I think this would double the throughput for many factories.”
Increasing the capacity of pre rigor processing leads to benefits across the whole processing chain all the way to the end consumer. Advantages include better product quality, and reduced storage and transport costs.
Marel has a long history of working with partners in the industry such as Bremnes Seashore to develop better and better ways to process salmon. In the new age of Industry 4.0, factories are taking big leaps in automation and rethinking every step of the processing value chain, so collaboration is vital.
“It’s been a great project with everything working perfectly,” says Husa. “There’s always great follow-up and it’s also been good to get to know the people at Marel.”
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