IceFresh boosts quality and productivity with FleXicut deal

As part of a major deal announced earlier today between Marel and leading
Icelandic seafood company Samherji, a FleXicut system will be installed at
IceFresh in Germany, where an extensive Marel salmon installation is already in
progress.

As Samherji and Dutch company Parlevliet van der Plas prepare to install
FleXicut systems on their freezing trawlers, the first land installation as part of
the deal will take place at IceFresh, a Samherji fresh fish operation in Frankfurt.

“Marel is the biggest supplier of equipment for the IceFresh production, and the
FleXicut installation will further modernize the already highly advanced
processing operation in Frankfurt,” says Sigurdur Olason, Managing Director
Marel Fish.

The system will further improve product quality at IceFresh, as well as
productivity and efficiency, with significant improvements in product handling
and yield.

Time is a vital factor in the quality of fresh fish products. Although IceFresh is
situated far from the closest harbor, it is close to its end customers, so it can
deliver fresh, high quality fish very quickly. Right next door is Metro, a major
international fish trader and one of IceFresh’s biggest customers, and IceFresh
simply opens an internal door and wheels the product through to Metro.

As IceFresh Managing Director Sigmundur Andresson explains, “Top quality in
the fresh fish industry is very connected to logistics and time.”

The FleXicut water-jet cutter with high-precision bone detection automatically
removes pinbones in whitefish and portions it with high accuracy to customer
specifications. It can produce uniform, precision-cut products that are then
distributed into up to eight different product streams specified by FleXicut’s
software intelligence, using the FleXisort product distribution system.

On top of the benefits of increased automation, the intelligence of the FleXicut
system means that processors can better control the flow to avoid any buffer
problems by ensuring that production never exceeds the capacity of other
processes. Innova Food Processing Software brings all the vital data directly to
managers in real time. Once FleXicut is installed at IceFresh, managers will be
able to manage and optimize the whole production process to control the
distribution of raw material coming in, and control production based on product
orders.