Sea Harvest is transforming its hake factory at Saldanha Bay in South Africa with advanced processing equipment and software. The installation, scheduled to take place in August this year, will entail a major overhaul of the facility with new equipment and software supplied by Marel.
Sea Harvest has always worked to a policy of continuous improvement. Its factory freezer vessels and two processing facilities process and pack more than a hundred products for local and international markets.
The company’s determination to maintain the high quality of its products is a key motivation behind the new installation, designed to ensure superior handling and a seamless product flow throughout production, while minimising drip loss and controlling temperatures in its land-based facilities.
The new system will also raise productivity and include software for the individual monitoring of key performance indicators.
The Marel installation covers raw material grading, trimming, portion cutting, batching and packing lines. All hardware will be new, except for the freezers and filleting machines. The software incorporated into the solution will optimise grading, packing and labelling, as well as ensure traceability and quality control. The flexible solution allows for future growth and seasonal fluctuations.
Sea Harvest has looked to Marel have plenty of shared history, going back to when Sea Harvest took its first big steps towards automation in the late nineties with a Marel automatic grading system for raw material, as well as distribution down to the filleting lines.
‘Sea Harvest is a leader in its field and Marel is proud to have been part of the Sea Harvest journey for the past 25 years,” said Kristmann Kristmannsson, Marel’s area sales manager. ‘It takes a dedicated team to transform a whole processing operation and this project is the culmination of many years of working together to develop a world-class facility that would make it easy for Sea Harvest to do what they do best: produce top quality hake.’
Sea Harvest has gone to great lengths to ensure that both the factory and their employees are prepared for the installation, moving to two-shift processing, for example, in anticipation of the new flowline being installed.
The nature of jobs at the factory is constantly being transformed alongside the introduction of new technologies and this installation is a case in point, with many adjustments that are expected to improve working conditions, as well as create some entirely new roles and opportunities. The installation will reduce the need to manually transport product between processes, for example, and will ensure accurate and transparent performance monitoring.
A further benefit of the installation is that it will promote greater transparency with employees being able to see how they are performing and how they can improve their output themselves.
