The Seafood Company is one of the UK’s largest white fish processing companies. It has a turnover in excess of £300m and produces more than one million seafood meals a day.
AFOS was called in to assist Midgleys with a major re-organisation of its processing operation and in particular to increase defrosting capacity by 100 tons of H and G white fish per week.
“The Seafood Company has an agreement with Hull based Midgleys to supply filleted white fish including, cod, haddock and mackerel.”
Solution
Midgleys had been using a cabin plant system for defrosting but this had become outdated and critically lacked automation to enable controlled defrosting.
AFOS installed an AT3/4500 defroster with a capability of defrosting 4,500 tons of fish per defrost cycle.
The machine was fully equipped with a Siemens touch screen programmable system enabling perfect defrosting regardless of variety or size of fish.
Features included:
- Siemens S7 PLC Control Module
- Automatic reversing air flow facility
- Automatic humidification system
- Multi function alarm and emergency stop system
- Automatic bactericidal spray system with control system
- Chart recorder for chamber and product temperature recording
- 2 Core/Temperature probes to be inserted into the product blocks to provide display of product temperature
- Product temperature alarm system to indicate when required product temperature achieved
Customer Benefits
AFOS provided a cost effective solution which delivered flexibility to the defrosting operations.
Defrosting time was greatly reduced with a defrost cycle of 4-5 hours plus the added the benefit of the process being carefully controlled to meet the demands of The Seafood Company’s customers.
The benefit of the humidity control provides potential for significant improvements in yield.
Midgleys now able to meet the 100 tons a week increase in production required by The Seafood Company.