Mowi will produce in excess of 60,000 tonnes of fish this year and is proposing a new facility at feed plant in Skye, amongst other considerations.
In the latest issue of Mowi Scotland’s newsletter The Scoop, MD Ben Hadfield wrote that Mowi has a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to build a state-of-the-art salmon processing facility in Scotland.
Hadfield highlighted that 2019 would be a bumper year where Mowi Scotland would likely produce in excess of 60,000 tonnes of salmon.
He wrote that the options under consideration are;
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- Increasing capacity in Fort William, either by expanding the current facility at Blar Mhor, or by identifying a suitable site elsewhere in Fort William increasing the capacity at Donegal.
- Expanding our value-added facility at Rosyth and increasing its scope
- Introducing ocean processing onboard Mowi’s vessels.
- Building a new processing facility at our new shoreside feed plant at Kyleakin on Skye.
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“While all options are on the table at this point, and whilst it is still early days and there is a lot of work to do, a preferred option is to build a new state-of-the-art facility at our feed plant at Kyleakin. The reasons that made Kyleakin our preferred choice to build our new feed plant are also relevant when choosing a location for a fish processing facility. We have invested a lot of money into the pier and it makes sense to optimise that. We would be able to bring our salmon directly from our farms by sea to Kyleakin and the pier would not limit the size of a vessel transporting the salmon as is currently the case at Mallaig where the salmon are harvested. At Kyleakin, we could build a facility with future capacity in mind and we could harvest, process and fillet the fish all in the same location,” added Hadfield.
The target for completion and full operation of the new plant is 2024.
