Big fish adds value to farmed salmon

We're just coming up to our busiest time of year here at Annan. A third of our output is smoked salmon and, while we also produce a lot of wet fish and ready meals, we still have a big peak around Christmas. Even more so now, because we're doing an increasing number of 'party' products like terrines and smoked salmon appetisers.

Back in 1976, when this business started, it was based in an old farmhouse a few miles down the road and it only employed six people. We currently have 750 permanent staff and we take on about 300 temporary workers between September and December. So things have changed quite dramatically.

The business was originally called Pinneys of Scotland. It started out doing trout fillets, then salmon, and eventually became a smokehouse. It moved into wet fish filleting -- mainly salmon -- then ready meals too.

The building we're in today was built by Hillsdown Holdings in 1985 as a ready meals factory. They had taken Pinneys over, and in 1996 they decided to extend this factory and consolidate everything on one site -- smoked fish, wet fish, ready meals and terrines -- and it's now an 11,500m2factory. Hillsdown demerged its food business in 1999 and formed Terranova Foods, which was then bought by Unigate. Unigate then became Uniq, and that's what Annan is now part of.

Our manufacturing manager, Ali Scaife, was one of the original Pinneys line operatives, so he has seen all the changes, which have been quite dramatic. I joined nearly 10 years ago, straight from university. I came in as a trainee buyer and ended up as purchasing manager. Eventually I picked up logistics and services too, then planning and materials, and two years ago I was given the operations manager role.

The dynamics of the business have changed a lot. If you go back four or five years, there were periods when volumes would be quite low, especially January to March. But there has been a push towards developing products with less of a Christmas peak, such as ready meals.

One of the big challenges is that as we've got more successful, Christmas has got bigger too. We do a lot of what we call 'customer ordering' products for M&S. These are hand-assembled party dishes like prawn platters that the shopper orders from a catalogue. With those, everything is compressed into the Christmas holiday, so it's a huge logistical exercise. We'll ship tens of thousands of units in the space of two or three days.

Year-round, another big growth area is semi-prepared dishes, which are basically raw fish in sauce that you need to cook at home. It could point the way forward for our recipe dishes. It's certainly where we're focusing a lot of our autumn product development.

That's a fairly straightforward hand-depositing operation. We cut the fish in the wet fish butchery, put the portions in preformed trays, and deposit a sauce. But we had to reorganise the operation to facilitate it. We took an area that was being used for a very small range of prawn cocktail-style chilled salads and took the strategic decision to close that down, and since April we've had a whole area dedicated to semi-prepared raw fish in sauce.

It's quite a diverse site. We're predominantly a salmon business, processing about 10,000 tonnes of farmed fish per annum as well as a small amount of wild Pacific salmon. But those fish could end up anywhere in the factory: the smokery, the delicatessen section, recipe dishes, wet fish, semi-prepared dishes, or patés and mousses.

We take deliveries from the farms six or seven days a week by the truckload. Fish we're going to smoke is hand-filleted. We then salt the sides, cure them, smoke them using oak smoke in an Afos kiln for about 12 hours, mature them and machine slice them. We've actually got another operation 90 miles west of here, just north of Stranraer, at Finnarts Bay, where we hand-carve smoked salmon, mainly for the export market.

But the bulk of our fish are headed, filleted and pin-boned by machine, mainly using Baader equipment. We've just invested around £1m upgrading or replacing the previous line. We've significantly reduced our bone complaints and improved the factory environment as well. We now take out waste ice and fish offal using a Taifun extraction system, which pumps it straight into a bulk tanker rather than into skips as before. Polystyrene boxes are automatically tipped on to the line and conveyed away overhead for crushing outside.

Previously, salmon was all decanted into hoppers and the polystyrene had to be removed by forklift. When you've got 250 tonnes of salmon a week coming in, just moving about is a problem. Now, it's much cleaner and safer.

Some of the kit is industry standard but some of it was made by CCH, based in Carlisle, who built the line. They designed the conveyorisation, the product flows and the ergonomics, and they built in a fish washer too.

So all our salmon comes in this way, and we create what we call a 'prep side' -- a skinless, boneless side of fish. We might portion that for our own use in ready meals, or portion it and pack it for the retail market in various shapes and sizes. Some of the fresh portions -- the premium specifications -- are hand-cut, but predominantly they're cut by water jet.

We don't sell steaks at all now. The market has become very differentiated, and steaks became such a small chunk of it that we've put all our efforts into supplying skinless, boneless fish in fixed-weigh packs. There's still quite a lot of catch-weight trading out there, where fish is sold by the kilo. But mostly we pack in thermoformed trays, in twos or fours, fixed weight.

So, from the filleting machines we're either portioning to pack and despatch fresh, or we transfer it internally to be poached, which takes us into the whole area of ready meals, mousses and terrines.

Mousses and patés form part of our high-risk section and they're very important because they help us recover a lot of the by-product: the scraps of fish that are too small to be used anywhere else. Utilisation is a big issue. In the wet fish section, there's demand from certain customers for the premium portions, which generally means they're taken from the centre of the side. But we've got to be mindful of finding a market for the necks, tails and off-cuts as well. That's something our customers are conscious of too, because they get a better deal if we're making good use of the whole fish.

In the ready meals section we've got two high-care filling and sealing lines, plus a line where we tray-pack warm-water prawns. We also use a lot of prawns in recipe dishes for things like prawn curry.

All the sauces and ingredients are fed to the line from the low-risk cooking and preparation section. In there, we've got a combination of Giusti and Skerman kettles, brat pans, continuous steam cookers, batch cookers and a 'form cooker' to create a pan-seared effect, particularly on prawns. We've just put £300,000 into a cook-quench-cool cooker made by DC Norris. That's a carbohydrate cooker and it increases our capacity for pasta and rice cooking as well as delivering improved quality.

A lot of areas of the factory are feeding into one another, and one of the keys to the site is keeping tabs on all those internal transfers. It's basically a paper-based system where we weigh everything from one section to another. The long-term aim has to be to automate it, but it's about getting the balance between the number of transactions and the cost of administering the system.

Some areas are really simple. In smoking it's pretty much 'protein weight in' and 'protein weight out' because you've only got two ingredients: fish and salt. But in recipe dishes, say, you can have up to 20 components. The way we do it, each department charges another for a particular product, and in principle you're 'sold' a weight of salmon at something representing production cost -- although no money changes hands, of course.

Uniq is looking at how it can upgrade the various systems used across its factories and standardise them into a single, standard package. I suppose ideally, every transfer would be booked against a computerised works order, and everything would be scanned. That would be the holy grail.

Interview by Mick Whitworth​

personal

Name: William Duncanson.

Age: 33.

Career highlights: Joined Pinneys of Scotland, which later became Uniq Prepared Foods -- Annan, after taking degree in economics at Abertay University. Joined as trainee buyer, and gradually took charge of purchasing, logistics, planning and materials before becoming ops manager two years ago.

Domestics: Lives with girlfriend in Lockerbie and they're expecting their first child.

Outside work: Keen golfer.

factory facts

Location: Uniq Prepared Foods -- Annan, Stapleton Road, Annan, Dumfriesshire DG12 6JP. Tel: 01461 207149.

Size: 11,500m2factory on 36,000m2site

Employees: 750 (plus up to 300 temps)

Throughput: 10,000 tonnes of farmed Scottish salmon per annum

Main products: Smoked salmon, fresh salmon portions, seafood recipe dishes, semi-prepared meals, delicatessen and party foods, and mousses and terrines.