Samherji chooses Maritech Eye for fish processing line
Icelandic fishing and land-based fish farming company Samherji is to install the Maritech Eye automated sorting system in one of its processing lines, seafood software provider Maritech announced today.
Maritech Eye will be integrated into a single line at Samherji’s Utgerdarfelag Akureyringa (UA) whitefish processing plant in the company’s hometown of Akureyri, and will be extended to total processing operations once operational experience has been gained.
“For the last months we have been developing, with Maritech, a system that focuses on finding the main defects in fillets; blood spots, nematodes, gaping, black lining and shape deviations,” said UA production manager Sunneva Ósk Guðmundsdóttir in a press release.
“The objective has been to identify the fillets that require no trimming and thus can go directly to portioning. This gives considerably more yield in production and reduces the manual workload for pre-trimming.”
Value creation
Konrad Hatlemark Olavsson, of Maritech Iceland, said: “UA/Samherji has led the way in this project the whole time and has been pioneering the commercial utilisation of this technology in whitefish processing. We are grateful for our cooperation, and we are confident we can make a great difference and create considerable value for Samherji.”
Maritech Eye can be used for both whitefish and salmon. In Scotland, salmon farmer Mowi’s Consumer Products division has been using the system at its secondary processing plant in Rosyth, Fife, since late 2021.
Samherji is primarily a fishing company but also farms Arctic char at two land-based facilities that are close to the capital, Reykjavik, in southwest Iceland, and produces around 1,200 tonnes of Atlantic salmon per year at Öxarfjörður in the north.
