Fishmeal production starts at HB Grandi´s plant at Akranes

HB Grandi’s fishmeal plant at Akranes has started production, following the first cargo of capelin of the season that arrived on Saturday. Faxi RE docked with 1430 tonnes that morning and later that day Víkingur AK arrived with a further 1410 tonnes on board, according to HB Grandi.

‘It takes a little while to get the factory running after a long break, but now everything is running at full tilt and hopefully we won’t have much of a wait before the next landing,’ said Gudmundur Hannesson, factory manager at HB Grandi in Akranes, who explained that there are ten people working in capelin production on two five-man shifts. Contractors land the fish, as they do with the groundfish landed at the HB Grandi factory, which has a production capacity of between 850 and 900 tonnes of raw material per day,so the fish already landed should last the factory until tomorrow night. The next landing is not yet certain, but two of HB Grandi’s pelagic vessels are now fishing off Ingólfshöfdi.

According to Gudmundur Hannesson, they had an excellent season last year with 42,000 tonnes processed at the factory.

‘Last year we started earlier, at around the 18th of January and we had more or less unbroken production through to the 24th of March. Freezing capelin roe for the Japanese market started on the 25th of February and hopefully the roe content is much the same as it was then. That means it shouldn’t be long before we can start taking roe, and that means we’ll have plenty to keep us busy,’ Gudmundur Hannesson said.