TURKEY
More Aquaculture processes four ďŹ sh species
Frozen ďŹ llets in several different formats More Aquaculture is a producer and exporter of seabass, seabream, meagre and trout. The company has its own production of seabass and seabream and a network of suppliers that provide the company with the trout it requires to meet its commitments. The company has been in the aquaculture business for the last 13 years and is owned by the AKG Group, a conglomerate with interests in building materials and tourism apart from ďŹ sh.
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ith three production facilities along the Izmir coast of the Aegean Sea offering a combined capacity of 3,350 tonnes of seabass and seabream a year, More Aquaculture is among the bigger Turkish producers of seabass and seabream. In addition to these species, the company also offers its customers trout and meagre in different presentations. Trout and meagre, however, are not produced by the company itself, but are obtained from external suppliers. The company thus produces a wide range of products and product forms that are sold on markets in more than 15 countries including the European Union, the US, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates.
Half the fish goes into fishmeal The company’s processing plant is located in Izmir enabling the fish from the cages to be brought to the plant within 90 minutes of being harvested. The proximity of the plant to the on-growing cages means that the fish is processed, while it is still very fresh resulting in a better quality product with a longer shelf life. The company produces and processes fish of several different sizes depending on the www.eurofishmagazine.com
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demands of the market and the individual customer. Mr Cenk Limni, engineer responsible for quality control in the factory, says the company works with fish that vary in size from 200 g to 1 kg in the case of seabass and seabream and from 200 g to 350 g in the case of trout. Fillets usually weigh between 50 g and 250 g. The fillets are produced by hand, lines of women stand at a belt taking a fish and filleting it in a few seconds. They are skilled at producing the fillets, says Mr Limni, and the yield we can get from manual filleting is higher than what we can expect from a machine, which is why we prefer to use people. But the yield even from manual filleting is only around 50, that is, 10 kg of fish will result in 5 kg of fillets. The fillets can be cut in different ways depending on what the customer requires – a butterfly fillet, standard cut, or V-cut, head on or off, skin on or off – but the yield remains more or less the same. Fillets can further be supplied with the pinbones out (PBO) or with them still in place (PBI). While fillets account for the bulk of the production about a third of the volume is gutted fish, a proportion that changes from time to time. Although half the fish is discarded, the company recovers at least some of the cost by
Asli Kahramanoglu is responsible for exports at More Aquaculture.
The filleting is done by hand as the yields are higher than from machine filleting. Even manual filleting, however, will result in a yield of only 50%.
selling the waste to a contractor for conversion into fish meal. The facility is equipped to produce both fresh and frozen products. A high capacity spiral freezer is used to rapidly freeze the fish which is
packaged as required by the customer. For example, individually frozen fillets are packaged in bulk in plastic-lined cartons, or in poly ethylene bags for the retail market, while fresh fillets are stored under ice chips in EPS boxes. The Eurofish Magazine 5/ 2015
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