POLAND
BK Salmon smokes Norwegian salmon in Poland
Daily capacity about 40,000 packs of smoked salmon Poland is one of Europe’s biggest salmon importers. A lot of the salmon are only processed in Poland, however, mainly smoked, and then exported again. Alongside the big well-known players there are also some smaller companies that do good business in this market segment, for example BK Salmon, a traditional salmon smokehouse. They stand out for their comprehensive service, and their responsiveness to customer wishes.
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K Salmon processes exclusively fresh salmon from Norway, Marcin Kostyszyn, the company Sales Director, assures us. They still use traditional smoking techniques. “Hand salting, smoke from hard wood chips and time, you don’t really need anything else for a good smoked salmon.” On average the fresh salmon from Norway takes three days to get to the smokehouse which is not far from Gdynia. “We buy the raw materials head on, gutted because we can then fillet the fish ourselves and gear all the subsequent processing steps exactly to our requirements”, explains Kostyszyn. BK Salmon’s team of 120 employees work together well in two shifts a day (the third shift is for the cleaning brigade). Once the salmon has arrived at the plant it rarely takes longer than 12 hours before the fillets are ready smoked. Two to three trucks of Norwegian salmon are delivered every week. This adds up to nearly 2,000 t of raw materials in the course of a year. The company can produce 40,000 200 g packs of smoked salmon per day, both vacuum and modified atmosphere packed. One of BK Salmon’s little specialities is that they smoke the salmon fillets without the skin. After
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Eurofish Magazine 1 / 2014
Marcin Kostyszyn, Sales Director. BK Salmon offers customers a select range of salmon, halibut, and trout products.
salting, which is almost exclusively done by hand, the fish is dried and then put into the smoker. Marcin Kostyszyn remarks that they prefer hand salting because that enables the best quality. About 90 of the smoked salmon products are produced in this way. Salt content in the final product is usually between 3.5 and 4.5.
“As a customer-oriented supplier we can also of course inject the salt into the products, or combine the two methods if that is what the buyer wants.” The Sales Director points out the fact that the fresh salmon is never frozen at any stage of the production process. The smoked fillets are cooled to a temperature of 2°C prior to slicing
to make them slightly firmer for the slicing process but this could not be compared with freezing. The microbiological safety of the products, whose quality was only recently acknowledged by two DLG (German Agricultural Association) medals, was tested regularly in the company’s own laboratory. www.eurofishmagazine.com