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——Aquatic product processing from an equipment manufacturer’s perspective
Aquatic product processing companies have higher and higher requirements for product standardization, so the demand for automation in the processing link will become stronger and stronger. In the future, there will be more and more “dark factories” in the seafood industry! “From our practical experience, we know that there is still a long way to go for automated fish slice processing production lines, but the distance to successful realization is not far.”
Hong
R & D Director
Guangzhou Suntok Food Machinery Co., Ltd.
As a representative processed aquatic product in China in recent years, snakehead fish slice has now developed a market size of more than 100,000 tonnes and has become one of the most important fish slice raw materials in China.
The development of snakehead fish slice processing is also a process of continuously optimising technology and formula and improving taste. The improvement of water retention index, thickness, marinating formula and other dimensions has made snakehead fish slice a hot product in aquatic processing. This is inseparable from the important support of fish slice processing equipment. It can be said that the expansion of snakehead fish slice market is also the development history of iterative upgrading of processing equipment.
We are a fish slice processing equipment company established in 2013. We have witnessed the whole process of my country’s fish slice industry from fresh to processing, from primary processing to deep processing. In Foshan, Guangdong, where the domestic toman industry chain is the most complete, we are one of the first companies in China to start intensive cultivation of aquatic processing equipment. We mainly develop and produce professional fish processing equipment, including fully automatic fish slicing machines, automatic fish slice washing lines, automatic scale removal lines, fish skin removal machines, and comprehensive fish killing machines.
We are a very pragmatic team. We have done a lot of research into many of the difficulties currently faced in the processing of fish slices and looked for technical solutions. There are also many practical cases.
What are the current pain points in fish slice processing? What are the ideas and solutions to solve these pain points?
The history of the development of fish slicing is the continuous improvement of the level of automation!!
Hong (R & D Director): Domestic aquatic product processing has experienced explosive growth in the past decade. Compared with foreign countries, the development time is not long, and the development process is inseparable from the optimization and upgrading of aquatic product processing machinery. When the company was first founded (around 2013), domestic fish slice processing equipment was mainly imported from Japan, South Korea and Europe. At that time, the domestic processing equipment was slightly backward, but the imported equipment was difficult to meet the needs of domestic freshwater fish processing.
We entered the fish slicing industry with an online shop model. At that time, many customers had already expressed specific needs for fish slicing machines. We went to Japan and South Korea to look for equipment solutions and found that the fish slicer in Japan and South Korea could only solve the problem of cutting fish slices with a thickness of more than 3-3.5 mm. However, due to the relatively strong toughness of the snakehead skin, the fish slicing equipments in Japan and South Korea at that time could not fully meet the processing needs of domestic toman fish slices.
Since we couldn’t buy the right equipment, we developed it ourselves. We developed the first fish slicing machine in China, which promoted the development of snakehead fish slicing processing. We then developed the second generation fish slicing machine with improved performance. It was mainly used in chain sauerkraut fish stores from 2015 to 2017, solving the stores’ requirements of standardising food thickness and replicating mass production.
However, the fish slicing machine has a problem when used in pickled fish shops: the machine circuit is not waterproof enough. Because the kitchen environment is relatively humid, the waterproof performance of the equipment is very high, otherwise it is easy to trip. When some of the machines in the stores had problems with tripping, we repaired them, but it was still difficult to stabilise them. In order to completely solve this problem, we asked a professional team to reprogram the equipment program and use PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) to control the machine, which stabilised the current and basically solved the problem of the equipment tripping.
Since 2017, under the rapid expansion of pickled fish chain stores, many factories specialising in snakehead slices processing have emerged. After the emergence of these processing factories, fish slice processing equipment faced another challenge: the processing volume could not meet the factory’s daily production capacity. In the past, the processing equipment used in catering stores only needed to work continuously for 3-5 hours to meet daily consumption. The equipment used in the processing plant may need to work continuously for more than ten hours, so the machine will have problems due to overloading. Therefore, we developed the third generation of CNC equipment to meet the production capacity needs of the processing plant. In recent years, we have developed the fourth generation of automated processing equipment. This is our iterative process in the field of mechanical equipment development along with the development of domestic fish slice processing.
Question 1: From an equipment manufacturer’s point of view, what are the specific needs that still need to be addressed in the current processing of aquatic products, in particular the processing of fish slices?
Hong (R & D Director):I think there are still four practical needs at the moment, which boil down to the fact that the processing link is still heavily reliant on manual labour.
The first is the filleting and trimming, which is also the link that aquatic product processing companies most want to de-manualize, because if there are too many human factors in this link, it will be difficult to control quality stably. Only by relying on equipment to achieve standardisation can the real needs of processing companies be met.
The second is slicing. We and the processing companies have studied the slicing process, but even with a slicer, manual operation is required. If a factory uses 10 fish slicers, it means that 7-10 people are needed to operate them. There are human operation factors and hygiene standard factors in the slicing corners and other links, and the shape of each slice may not be standardised.
The third is cleaning. Most processing plants rely on manpower for cleaning, and a box of fish slices weighs about 25 kilograms, which requires tall and strong employees to be competent in cleaning. Objectively, this is a threshold for recruitment. The final step is packaging, where efficient automated packaging has not yet been fully achieved.
Aquatic product processing companies have increasing demands for product standardisation, so the demand for automation in the processing chain will increase. In the future, there will be more and more “dark factories” (smart factories, intelligent factories, digital factories) in the seafood industry. Under this trend, each processing link, from trimming, slicing, cleaning to packaging, must eliminate dependence on manual labour in order to achieve a fully automated production line.
Question 2: Automation is said to be the future trend in fish slice processing. How far is China’s fish slice processing industry from realising a fully automated production line?
Hong (R & D Director): We started researching fully automated production lines three years ago. If we can get through the four links of filleting, slicing, cleaning, and inner packaging, we will be close to achieving full automation. In practice, some of our customers have successfully implemented fully automated production lines at many nodes.
From intelligent weighing, conveyors and stainless steel temporary fish ponds for transporting live fish raw materials, to automated bleeding, descaling, filleting, trimming and slicing in the workshop, to each link of cleaning and tumbling, we have designed 7 automated processing solutions. If the automated processing solutions are used in all links, it will be a fully automated production line.
However, there are still some difficulties to be overcome and solved in the application of automation, such as the application of robotic arms. The robotic arm mainly automatically picks up the raw materials and transports them to the equipment, and then automatically transports the filleted fish to the designated conveyor belt. However, the automatic placement of fish fillets may cause deviation, while manual placement is more neat.
This difference has a direct impact on the subsequent infrared sensor link: during the robotic arm transport test, if the fish fillets are too small, the infrared may not be able to detect the fillets placed, resulting in incorrect weight and specification readings and ultimately data errors.
Another application difficulty is the cleaning process. Some customers hope that after automated cleaning the water retention parameters will still be within the controllable range. However, to achieve this goal, it is necessary to design a blocking link in the automated process for more refined processing to ensure that each fish fillet can still meet the relevant parameter requirements after water retention and cleaning.
We already have solutions to the problems mentioned above. For example, by adapting the production line so that the fish fillets enter and leave in a centralised manner, the overall coefficient and data of the fish fillets are within a controllable range. This solution has been successfully tested, but the price of the equipment is relatively high.
In general, we know from our practical experience that the automated fish slice processing line still has a long way to go, but it is not far from successful realisation.
Question 3: The foreign aquatic product processing industry is a good reference. Compared with the advanced foreign aquatic product processing production lines, what are the gaps in China’s processing equipment?
Hong (R & D Director):Firstly, there is a lack of concentration among process equipment companies in investing in research and development and focusing on solving practical problems in the industry. There is also a lack of patent protection. When a company develops a piece of equipment, other companies may immediately follow suit and produce the same model, and it is difficult for the company that developed the original product to obtain patent royalties. In essence, the fierce competitive environment in the market needs to be optimised.
At the same time, the supplier base for equipment manufacturing is not yet complete, and the performance of many electronic components is not as good as their foreign counterparts. Many spare parts have to be imported from abroad.
The parts supporting industry system is very important for aquatic processing equipment, which is particularly evident for laser cutting machines. For example, in Guangdong, where the domestic processing equipment support system is relatively complete, there is a market for stainless steel and other parts near the equipment factory. The complete support system reduces the cost of processing machinery and shortens the production cycle of the machinery.
However, on the positive side, in recent years, the domestic aquatic product processing market has been growing, and more and more aquatic product processing enterprises have been expanding their production capacity, and have also had clearer and more specific demands for equipment upgrades and production applications. As a processing equipment supplier, we are optimising and innovating solutions based on these requirements and solving the practical problems of aquatic product processing. This is a great driving force for the progress of aquatic product processing in my country.
Question 4: In addition to traditional processed seafood forms such as fish slices and fish steaks, what other processed seafood forms do you think have market potential?
Hong (R & D Director): Aquatic products can be processed and developed in a variety of forms. For example, there are a variety of processed product forms for fish. Panlong fish, for example, has a certain market consumption, but the current processing relies on manual labour for cutting and placing, and there is basically no special processing equipment for quantitative production of this product.
Another direction is equal weight cutting. Currently, some equipment suppliers have developed visual equal weight cutting equipment that uses 3D visual scanning to ensure that the weight of each product is essentially the same.
However, there are two problems with this solution. One is the cost problem, the equipment cost is relatively high, and the other is the error problem. Because fish products are attached with water, it will affect the effect of light reflection, resulting in data errors. Our solution to this problem is to use 2D vision to scan the periphery of the fish, measure the volume of the product, and then intelligently calculate the weight of each product. The data error during the test can be controlled between 1-2g.
In addition, soft-shelled turtle is a new type of prepared seafood dish with market potential, but currently soft-shelled turtle processing is still mainly done by hand and there is great potential for future processing.
Question 5: With such fierce competition in the market, aquatic product processing companies clearly feel that customers’ demands for products are becoming more and more sophisticated, so that processing technology is also constantly being adapted. What are your feelings and observations in this regard?
Hong (R & D Director):We are a service provider to seafood processing plants. For fish slice products, we have indeed noticed that in recent years, processing plants have optimised the processing technology to adjust the thickness, taste, flavour and other indicators of fish slices. Take the thickness of snakehead slices as an example. In the beginning, it was about 2mm, and then it gradually developed from 1.75mm to 1.5mm. In recent years, the mainstream thickness of fish slices has reached 2.5-3 mm.
These adjustments and changes are based on the actual needs of terminal catering, and the ultimate goal is to give consumers a better taste, which is good for product promotion and industry development.
However, there are some requirements that are difficult to meet, such as overly demanding quantitative indicators. After meeting these indicators, it is difficult for the actual production equipment to maintain good slice shape and taste after processing. These parameters are relatively extreme and unreasonable requirements.
Therefore, a balance has to be struck between the demand for products in the terminal market and the actual degree of processing completion, which is a more feasible and reasonable processing technology solution.
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