CROATIA
Tajer salts and marinades anchovies for Spain and Italy
New factory will expand product range Small pelagics are an important component of the Croatian ďŹ shery and processing sector. Sardines and anchovies are the main small pelagic species that are caught and processed into a variety of products intended for the domestic market as well as for export.
A
number of Croatian companies are involved in the production and processing of sardines and anchovies from the Adriatic, fish which connoisseurs find quite different from similar species in other parts of the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. These are often caught and processed the same day, typically salted or marinated, to give a product that has all the benefits of being produced from fish that was caught a few hours before it is processed.
Raw material from three to four vessels Tajer is one of the companies on this market. Started by Zeljko Spralja, a serial entrepreneur in 1991 the company started in the local fish trading business before establishing a processing facility in 2008. Today the company has grown too big for its current premises and is now in the process of building a bigger facility to expand the production. Tajer owns one vessel that supplies the processing plant with raw material. This supply is augmented with catches from three or four other vessels with which the company has agreements. The catches are mostly of anchovies, and the volumes have been going up so that Tajer no longer has the space to store the product and is therefore planning to move its operations to an industrial estate, Policnik, some 15 km inland from Zadar. 36
Eurofish Magazine 4 / 2016
07_CROATIA.indd 36
The proximity of the fishing grounds means that fish is landed very fresh and can be processed or frozen immediately.
The new facility will also allow the company to freeze and store the raw material that does not get processed when it is landed. Currently, with the maximum capacity, we only work during the anchovy season, a period of three to four months, processing fresh fish, says Mr Ivos. Fishing for small pelagics is influenced by the moonlight. Vessels are equipped with lamps that aggregate the fish at night making them easier to catch. This however works only when there is little or no moonlight. This fact combined with the closed seasons when the fish are spawning substantially reduce the number days that fish can be caught to a relatively brief period.
Being able to store the fish is necessary for a processor to work independent of the fishing season. The new facility will enable us to freeze and store the larger amounts of the raw material so that we can process fish and supply our customers all year around. The plan is ultimately to move all the activities from the old facility to the new one.
Salted anchovies can only be manually filleted Tajer is very much a family owned business. Mr Ivos has two sons, one of whom works on board the company’s vessel while the other is the production manager in the
processing facility and, he confides, when they are interested in something then I get interested too. The new processing facility is being built with the assistance of a consultant, Dr Neven Bosnic, who has many years of experience in the small pelagics processing business. One of the products being made at the factory is fillets of salted anchovies. The anchovies are placed in barrels with salt and allowed to mature for three to four months. The fish are then removed from the barrels and filleted by hand as the salting and maturation process leaves the fish too delicate to be processed mechanically. Over nine tenths of the production www.eurofishmagazine.com
11/07/16 4:59 PM