CDT Project Champion / Advisor: Prof. Mark Swainson. [email protected]
Available: All day in person Tuesday 5th Lowestoft. Then online Microsoft Teams: Wednesday 6th 8.30am to 12.30am. Thursday 7th 8am to 9am – 10am to 11am – 12 to 1pm - 2pm to 4pm.
A "10 meter & under" class ( https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/uk-vessel-lists ) fishing boat has been to sea and is returning to Lowestoft harbour with the catch of the day (e.g. North Sea cod, sea bass, skate).
Whilst most of the catch will be landed packed in ice and sold fresh and whole at the fish market – the financial pressure on the fishing industry means that the fishing boat owners need to find additional ways of optimising income.
Looking at the UK vegetables / "fresh produce" sector for inspiration, it has been noted that many vegetable growing farms have over recent years moved into "adding value" to their produce. e.g. Consider the "ready prepared bagged salad" market – a generation ago the standard practice was to prepare salad at home from whole produce – a whole lettuce, a whole carrot, whole onion, baby leaf spinach etc. all prepared at home by washing, chopping, shredding and mixing into the salad bowl. Vegetable producers recognised that the consumer would be willing to pay a premium for the convenience of having all of this preparation work done for them in factories – and now the bagged RTE “Ready To Eat” salads market is a very established standard way of us all purchasing our salads.
The fishing vessel owners would like to secure some "added value" and "convenience" revenues of their own. Seeing the growth of home food delivery businesses like Deliveroo, the fishing vessel owners have conducted market research into local “prepared meal home deliveries” – this research suggests that the more affluent members of the local population would pay a premium for convenient access to “you cannot eat fresher” healthy fish-based meals which have been prepared and cook processed immediately upon landing at the harbourside – before then onward direct home delivery via Deliveroo (or any other home delivery service).
It is envisaged that the local affluent "at-home consumption" market would purchase 30 to 50 premium cooked fish meals each day when the fishing boat lands its catch. Home dining, dinner parties, small events etc. This market will consider it reasonable to have a purchase price cost of £25 for each meal – for this cost the meal has to be very good quality.
To be fast prepared and cost effective the seafood meal production process needs to avoid any requirement for cost of additional staff. The process of meal preparation therefore needs to be as automatic as possible using a combination of robotics, automation and wider digitalisation technologies (e.g. vision systems & AI).
The meal needs to consist of a fish fillet, a carbohydrate source (e.g. potato, pasta), and a vegetable source (e.g. carrots, broccoli). The food can be cooked in whatever way you decide is most appropriate and efficient e.g. steaming, frying, boiling, microwave, oven, etc.
The first stage of the meal production phase is the "Preparation Phase". Preparation is the stage before cooking. At this stage the fish has to be de-headed & tail / fins removed (unless you intend to cook whole), eviscerated and filleted ready for cooking. Carbohydrates have to be measured out in readiness for cooking. Vegetables need to be washed and cut to the required shape / size (e.g. sliced/ diced / shredded).
Automation machinery already exists for many of these aspects of ingredient preparation – but the machinery is often very large factory scale and therefore needs to be size reduced to an appropriately small scale to prepare the required 30 to 50 meals per daily production run.
TASK 1 (Suggested time allocation 15%): Consider the following examples of large factory scale fish and vegetable processing machinery. Then conduct a detailed appraisal as to how such machinery could be miniaturised to the appropriate scale for preparing the ingredients for just 30 to 50 meals a day with very little manual / operator intervention (as the idea is to minimise staff costs):
https://fish.baader.com/products/baader-582
https://www.urschel.com/all-machines/
Once all of the meal components have been prepared – the core project challenge is to cook the 30 to 50 meals in readiness for home delivery via Deliveroo. We would like you to consider the “Cooking” project in two parts... Task 2 (Suggested time allocation 70%): How would you create a highly robotic / automated meal cooking system to be based in a small building on the harbourside – ready to commence cooking as soon as the catch is landed, using a minimal amount of staff / manual intervention. The output should be the fully cooked meals, packaged and placed with the Deliveroo driver for delivery.
Task 3 (Suggested time allocation 15%): Once you have designed your harbourside seafood meal cooking operation – please then also consider and describe what steps you would need to take to be able to develop that meal manufacturing process to in future be located physically on the 10-meter fishing boat (rather than in a small building on the harbourside) - so that you would no longer have to wait to land the fish before starting the meal manufacturing process. The “prepared & cooked at sea” meal products could then be straight into the Deliveroo home delivery system the moment they are landed.