DENMARK
Ravnstrup Mølle supplies markets in several European countries
Dominating the Danish production of fresh trout on ice Tommy Brøgger the owner of Ravnstrup Mølle is particularly busy these days. At the beginning of this year he took over his competitor, Reinholdt, a company as big as his own, and is now working to integrate the two operations into a smoothly functioning unit.
T
he Danish trout farming industry has an international reputation for quality products and exported some 70 of its production in 2010. While some farmers export directly, others prefer to concentrate on the production while handing the sales to other companies.
Raw material collected from around the country One such company is Ravnstrup Mølle. Owned by Tommy Brøgger the company trades in trout, buying the fish from farms in Denmark and selling it mainly to customers in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. Live fish that range in size from 200 g to 1.5 kg are bought when they are ready to harvest, shipped by truck, and then stored in the tanks at Ravnstrup Mølle. Since he took over Ravnstrup Mølle four years ago, today Mr Brøgger has an accurate idea as to the volumes and sizes of the fish he can expect to sell on a daily basis. Fish are picked up each day from trout farms all over Jutland based on the expected demand, and are then stored, graded by size, in the concrete basins at Ravnstrup Mølle. Although getting the supplies has not been an issue, I find that we now have to drive further afield to collect the fish, says Mr Brøgger. This is partly because over the last four years he has managed to double www.eurofishmagazine.com
the turnover and now needs more fish, but also because trout farms have been closing down. The stringent environmental conditions make it difficult for small farmers to farm profitably and as they age the business cannot be sold and so it shuts down. In 2005 there were 300 freshwater pond facilities, a number which fell to 169 in 2011.
Changes in structure in Danish farming There have been other changes too in the structure of the Danish farming sector. Farms would often combine production and processing operations, buying fish from other farms if the in-house production was not big enough. Ravnstrup Mølle too used to include a farm with a production of 200 tonnes, and a couple of decades ago there were 15 such places, says Tommy Brøgger. Today, however, there are only a few left and Mr Brøgger owns two of them. The activities have also changed from farming to exclusively buying the live fish, gutting, and packing on ice for sale to processors and food service. Mr Brøgger supplies the smaller-scale end of the market. There are some big processors here in Denmark who need vast quantities of fish, he says, they process in a day what I could supply in a week. I do not sell to them as they buy their own live fish. I want my customers to know they can rely on me to give them what
Ravnstrup Mølle supplies fresh trout on ice to restaurants, catering establishments, fish mongers, and smokehouses in Germany, the Netherlands, and France.
they need in terms of quality and quantity and do it on a regular basis. The regularity of supply is as important as the quality of the product. In 2009, for example, a problem with regular supply led to the matter being taken up at the annual meeting of the Organisation of Danish Aquaculture, the industry association for the aquaculture sector. The chairman of the select committee for exporters and processors pointed out that neglecting the issue of supply would only open the door even wider to the competition.
New gutting machine was paid off in months The fish, while stored at Ravnstrup, are not fed at all, but as the orders come in the fish are removed from the tanks, stunned using electricity and placed in the gutting machines. The gutted fish are placed on ice and shipped to
smokehouses in Germany and Holland as well as to restaurants and catering establishments. In Germany they have much more of a tradition for smoking fish, says Mr Brøgger. Smokehouses are generally smaller and will smoke limited volumes of a variety of products, some eel, some trout, some salmon, while in Denmark there are a couple of large smokehouses that concentrate on smoking trout in large quantities for the retail chains. Mr Brøgger has been associated with the fish farming business and specifically with Ravnstrup Mølle for many years. He was an employee at Ravnstrup for a time before moving to New Zealand, where he worked on a farm cultivating chinook salmon. Back in Denmark he again worked for a while at Ravnstrup Mølle managing the production, but left after some 18 months. He was therefore completely familiar with the business when an opportunity
Eurofish Magazine 5 / 2013
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