Smoked salmon solution goes swimmingly for Meralliance

Ishida has designed and installed a complete solution for weighing and packing salmon lardons for smoked fish specialist Meralliance. Delivered exactly to schedule, this project has enabled Meralliance to meet its three major objectives.

“Thanks to the accuracy of the Ishida, overfill is consistently below 1%”
-Vincent Gélamur, Industrial Director, Meralliance

Meralliance produces 4,500 tonnes of smoked fish each year, and has a turnover of €82M. Headquartered at Quimper, in Brittany, it is the inventor of the smoked salmon lardon, an ingredient which is growing in popularity among discerning cooks as an extra touch of quality and flavour in pasta, salads, quiches, soups, kedgerees and many other dishes.

Meralliance's three objectives

Before the installation of the new line, Meralliance's salmon lardons were weighed out and manually placed on the infeed conveyor of a thermoformer. This laborious approach was fast becoming a limitation. As Vincent Gélamur, Meralliance's Industrial Director, puts it: "At the end of 2007, given the growing success of this product with the large and medium supermarkets, automating the smoked salmon lardons line became an obvious step. We had set ourselves three objectives: avoid overfill (a phenomenon that sadly is inevitable with manual packing), improve working conditions, and offer retailers the best possible pack presentation."

The Ishida solution

The chilled smoked salmon is diced, sorted on a vibratory conveyor and conveyed by vacuum direct to the dispersion table of a multihead weigher. The weigher is a 10-head model of the RS-Series, with a powerful vibratory system. However, despite its high (14-18%) oil content, the salmon is not as sticky as might be expected, owing to the fact that it has little time to warm up in the fast vacuum transfer from the cutting station.

Trays are denested and conveyed to an Ishida distribution system, where each receives its portion from the weigher. Next, the trays pass into an Ishida QX-775 Traysealer, where they are nitrogen flushed and sealed. Tray format (147mm x 113 mm x 18mm) and weighment size (90g) are such that each pack is quite full, a challenge which the distribution system and the QX-775's sealing system are able to meet very effectively.

Meeting demand

"Three and a half months after the order was placed, the line was producing 1800 trays per hour, and is capable of up to 3600," says Vincent Gélamur.

Reducing unnecessary overfill

The accuracy of the RS-Series multihead, which stems from Ishida's latest combination calculation hardware and software, is such that giveaway has been sharply reduced. As Vincent Gélamur comments: "We pack mainly into trays, with a target weight of 90g, and overfill has been less than 1%."

Better working conditions

The new line has entirely removed the laborious manual filling steps. Operation is simple, with clear, intuitive graphics. Cleaning too is easy: for example, the waterproof weigher has lift-off, drop-on contact parts while all product feed areas of the traysealer are accessible for rapid washdown.

Improved pack presentation

Finally, Meralliance's pack presentation objectives have also been met. The packs, which have a 6-day shelf life, are displayed standing on edge on the supermarket shelf. If they were not so generously filled and securely sealed, settlement would soon leave them looking underfilled. Their appearance is further enhanced by the neat 'inside-cut' seal delivered by the QX-775, which also equips them with an 'easy peel' facility.

Why Ishida?

Ishida was selected from five potential suppliers. Among the points in favour of Ishida were the fact that it could offer a complete solution incorporating both weighing and packing. Given the nature of the product, the easy-clean design of the equipment was another important factor.