Project: Mowi ASA, Scotland

As a major player in the seafood industry, Mowi ASA holds a prominent position among the world’s leading companies. It’s renowned as the largest global producer of Atlantic salmon, boasting a substantial harvest volume of 464.000 tons.

In Scotland, Mowi processes salmon at its dedicated Rosyth facility. Here, salmon is processed from full fish, to fillets, smoked salmon and more.

With an increase in market demand for Mowi’s products, the need for higher production capacity arose. Much of the work was still done by hand, which resulted in limited output and a high demand for labor. To achieve the next step in capacity growth, automation became a logical solution.

Lan Handling supplied a turn key end-of-line solution optimised for skin packed products.

Mowi’s Rosyth facility has implemented skin tray technology to improve the end-products shelf life and maximize the number of products per crate.

With a skin tray, unlike MAP technology, there is no flat surface to neatly stack the trays. Combined with a salmon fillet being thicker on one side, part of the packaging has to be rotated 180 degrees, in order to achieve the most efficient crate filling.

Vacuum skin packaging is something Lan Handling already had extensive experience with, but the rotation of the product combined with the high speed of 120 products per minute gave the engineering department a welcome challenge.

Lan Handling delivered two complete production lines with crate destackers, case packers and a palletiser.

With the turn-key solution, crates are automatically destacked and fed into the case packers; a vacuum gripper picks up the packs, rotates them in flight, and places them in an optimal pattern in the carrier. A palletising robot then stacks the full crates on pallets, after which they are ready for transport.

The total production capacity of these lines is 120 products per minute per line. The solution allows for maximum flexibility, suitable for both skin and MAP trays in most industry sized.