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Looking Eastward for New Business |
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Written by B. Tyril, A. Cross
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Friday, 11 April 2008 |
Frozen silver smelt products are to fill an untapped need in Eastern Europe with the opening of the Atlantis facility in Vestmanna — an environmentally friendly, highly automated processing plant.
With its focus on silver smelt for Eastern European markets, Atlantis, a new processing plant at Vestmanna, is due to open for business this spring. According to management, new concepts of operation are being applied to cope with restrictions implied in the current shortage of labor.
At the helm of the company, managing director Dánjal Jákup Andreasen is bringing with him a wealth of experience of the seafood processing business from his years running Vestmanna Fiskavirki and later Kollafjord Pelagic.
Atlantis will be operating from the former Vestmanna Fiskavirki premises, which have now been extended by a new 2,400 square meter production hall.
Behind the venture are two well-known trawler owners — Tummas Christophersen runs the Fram/Vestmenningur pair team and Dánjal Jacobsen operates the Vesturbúgvin/Skálafossur pair, and together they own pair team Nornagestur and Columbus, all fishing from their homeport of Vestmanna.
Silver smelt are fished from May to September, with around 12,000 tonnes landed annually, a fishery that has remained stable for the last 15 years. Three pair teams have been licensed to fish this species within the Faroe exclusive economic zone and, according to Mr Christophersen, they have worked closely with the national marine research institute, the Faroese Fisheries Laboratory, to assess the state of the stock as thoroughly as possible.
Before embarking on the 30 million dkk (4m eur) Atlantis venture, Mr Christophersen says he sought scientific opinion on the fishery’s sustainability.
“I talked to the director of the Faroese Fisheries Laboratory, Hjalti í Jákupsstovu, and he said that their research into the silver smelt concludes that the fishery is sustainable — although they haven’t yet gathered enough statistical data to present their findings to ICES.”
“There’s little doubt that this is indeed a sustainable fishery with only three pair teams allowed to take part,” Mr Christophersen adds. “After all, it’s a fishery that is limited to what these six boats can take over a five-month season.”
According to Mr Andreasen, Atlantis’ silver smelt production is to be based around wholefrozen, H&G (headed and gutted), and minced fish. He says the company has signed an agreement with Faroe Seafood to take over their silver smelt mince production, which will be integrated into the Atlantis plant.
A great deal of attention has been paid to reaching a suitable way of operating, including planning the layout of the new freezing, processing and cold storage systems.
Onshore processing in the Faroes is a tough business due to shortage of labor and high costs involved in staffing a processing plant. This is an ongoing problem in the Faroes, with many people leaving fish processing and reforms that would open the market to foreign labor still absent after a decade of debate. To circumvent this political bottleneck, industry is increasingly seeking less labor-intensive production methods.
Just about as much thought has gone into designing the Atlantis factory and its 1800-tonne capacity cold storage facility as went into business strategy plans.
“Employees will be supervising, monitoring and controlling various systems and units rather than doing anything physically laborious. So what we’re doing is not merely cut costs — the idea is also to attract people by making work as interesting and convenient for them as possible.”
One thing is optimizing for cost and comfort, another to bring maximum environmental care into the equation. One-tenth of the entire project investment has gone into eliminating organic waste and reducing CO2 emissions down to just about zero, according to Mr Andreasen. “We wanted to make sure from the outset that this production plant was going to be environmentally friendly,” he says.
Sophisticated automation, based on a recognition system to differentiate between color-coded packing, is at the heart of production, with freezing systems from an Italian, packing lines from a Danish, and cold storage solution from an Icelandic supplier.
“As well as silver smelt, we will also handle saithe from our own vessels and other pelagic species, if raw material is available,” Mr Andreasen says.
“Our strategy has been to seek out markets that have a requirement for differently-prepared seafood. Silver smelt production in the Faroes has for many years been focused on an exclusive segment that is prepared to pay for a value added product. The problem here is that adding this value also results in two-thirds of each fish being either discarded or sold as low-cost offal. But in targeting other markets, we can meet demand there for whole fish, H&G or mince, which in the final analysis yields a higher overall value.”
Link to pdf presentation...
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Fisheries, Seafood