Processing – Marine Harvest
Quarter master How Belgian boss quickly transformed the fortunes of salmon giant’s Rosyth factory
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ERTIL Buysse has worked at Marine Harvest’s Rosyth processing plant for one year and two months but confesses he has only been to Edinburgh, a few miles away over the Forth Road Bridge, twice. Living in a hotel near to the factory, the Belgian credited with turning a loss into a profit in two quarters does not have much spare time. With a track record in Marine Harvest’s Consumer Products division, running plants throughout Europe, he was brought in early last year and had replaced Andy Stapley as managing director by April. The Rosyth facility, opened in 2014, marked the Norwegian owned company’s move into downstream processing in Scotland and initially was hailed as a boon to Fife’s economy. But it had been garnering some unfavourable headlines in its difficult start-up phase and Buysse was tasked with breaking even by the third quarter in 2016 and going into the black in quarter four. He achieved both milestones and, in fact, the Scottish plant contributed €11.4 million of the total €13.1 million improvement in Marine Harvest’s Consumer Products results for the final quarter of 2016. Buysse now oversees a staff of 600 at the UK’s biggest (‘by far’) salmon plant, producing around 400 tonnes a week of fresh and smoked salmon for Sainsbury’s and other leading retailers. Rosyth, which Marine Harvest bought from Morpol in 2012, is a secondary processing factory – the fish are slaughtered and gutted in Fort William
Below: Bertil Buysse (left) and head of operations Gary Paterson. Right: Automatically portioned fillets.
– and processes ‘100 per cent Scottish salmon from Marine Harvest’. As Buysse said, ‘for the fresh UK market, it doesn’t make sense to send a Scottish fish to Poland [the site of their biggest factory] and back again!’ ‘That doesn’t mean we don’t want to do Norwegian salmon if the contract demanded it. But today it’s all Scottish.’ A butcher’s son, Buysse studied food technology and environmental sciences at university but said ‘for some reason I was interested in seafood’. He saw an advertisement for a fish farm in Scotland and ended up in the Hebrides with the Western Isles Seafood Processing Company – ‘my first encounter with the Scottish salmon farming industry’. ‘I’ve always had a connection with the sea,’ he says, ‘and if I go on holiday I need to see the sea, see the harbour and the local boats and see what fish they’re bringing in.’
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www.fishfarmer-magazine.com
03/04/2017 16:48:30