Researchers from the Fishery Research Institute in Norway have developed machines which can automatically remove all bones from fish fillets, a move which could change the face of boned fish processing.
According to a report from www.fis.com, it is feared that the innovation could lead to a significant reduction in the number of jobs in this sector of the industry.
The new machines have been designed to successfully remove fish spines, but the report says that the system does not tackle the problem of pin bone removal, which will consequentially remain a manual task.
The system is said to work in conjunction with an X-ray device which locates any remaining bones that the initial picking process might have missed.
The report stated that the devices have been tested for several months at a Norway Seafoods plant in Stamsund.
Furthermore, the researchers claim that the improved efficiency of the system means that fillet wastage is cut by around 4-6 per cent.
The technology has been developed by Fiskeriforskning (Fishery Research Institute), part of the Norut Group, which consists of five research institutes in Tromsø and Narvik.