Ishida gentle handling keeps frozen fish intact

Fandicosta is one of Europe’s largest integrated seafood products companies, catching and processing 26,000 tonnes per year of species ranging from squid and swordfish to tuna and cod.

Among Fandicosta’s range are 600 and 400 g bags of frozen hake fillets; each bag containing large (approximately 100 g) pieces that are well formed. “We try to avoid any very small pieces or fragments,” commented Ramón Hermida Gómez of Fandicosta, “and that means we must avoid breakages during packing.”

Formerly this gentle handling was achieved by using semiautomatic linear weighers, each feeding 14 operatives who manually placed the pieces in the bags. “The care taken by these people produced a high degree of product integrity,” said Ramón. “However, as you can imagine it was slow, partly because each bag had to be weighed again using a static balance. Going all out, such a line could only produce 20 bags per minute.”

To improve productivity, Fandicosta has begun introducing multihead weighing across its operation, with gentle handling weigher features from Ishida mounted over modern bagmakers. The weighers have wide, shallowly angled radial feeders and relatively short drop distances, to reduce impact and keep the fillets intact.

“We are keeping our breakages down to the same levels that we obtained using the manpower-intensive approach,” confirmed Ramón.

The Ishida weighers have achieved speeds of up to 35 ppm, freeing up skilled labour to work in other parts of the plant. “Accuracy has also greatly improved,” said Ramón Hermida, “which means we get a better yield of bags per tonne of fish.”