This Industry Voices edition features insights from Pablo Rodríguez Cordobés, CEO of Hermasa Canning Technology.
1. Hermasa works with some of the leading tuna processors worldwide. From your perspective, what are the biggest industrial challenges facing a modern tuna canning plant today?
The three that weigh most on any serious tuna canning plant are the same three we watch closely at Hermasa. First, the cost and volatility of raw material: tuna, oil, everything that goes into the can. In this business the fish is by far the largest cost line, so anything that moves that figure moves the entire P&L. Second, labor: finding and retaining skilled, reliable people is harder than it was a decade ago, and tuna processing still leans heavily on manual work in critical steps. Third, regulation —food safety, traceability, sustainability, labor standards—, which is rightly becoming ever more demanding and adds real operational complexity. None of these is, in itself, a technology problem. But each is a place where the right technology, applied for the right reason, can make a genuine difference. That’s the lens we bring.
2. In a sector where raw material cost is critical, where do you see the greatest opportunity to improve profitability: fish yield, automation, labor efficiency, energy savings, traceability, quality control, or process speed?
All of those aspects matter, and a good plant works on all of them at once. But if you force me to name the one that governs the rest, in tuna it’s yield: fish utilization. It’s the king metric. When raw material is your greatest cost, a single gram of tuna optimized per can, multiplied across millions of cans, is a saving of an entirely different order of magnitude. That doesn’t detract from automation, labor efficiency, traceability or quality—they’re essential, and in fact many of them are the means through which you protect and improve yield without sacrificing the quality of the tuna cake. But the discipline I’d urge on any processor is to keep asking one question: does this decision, ultimately, improve the number of good cans you can make from a given amount of raw material? That’s where the money is.
3. How much impact can technology have on improving fish utilization, reducing waste and increasing the competitiveness of tuna processing companies?
A decisive impact, provided it’s applied in the right order. Technology is what lets us push fish utilization beyond what human hands and experience can reach on their own, because it lets us see and control the process at a level of detail that simply wasn’t possible before. Advanced automation, IoT, data science and industrial AI are, together, opening doors that until very recently were closed to us. We’ve all seen how these technologies have transformed everyday life over the last few years; what’s exciting is that we’re now beginning to see that same leap arrive on the plant floor. But —and I think this is what matters— the value doesn’t come from the technology itself. It comes from pointing it at the right process problem, with deep knowledge of that process, and measuring it honestly against the outcome: more good cans from the same fish, less waste, and ultimately a lower cost per can. Technology that can’t be tied to that isn’t worth deploying.
4. Which technologies do you believe will define the tuna processing plant of the future? Robotics, artificial vision, real-time data, AI, advanced traceability systems, or integrated automation?
Let me answer slightly against the grain, because the honest answer is that no single technology «defines» the plant of the future on its own. What defines it is starting from a real need and a deep understanding of the process, and only then reaching for the right tool. Technology has to be a means, never an end; the moment you invert that order, you get impressive demos that never deliver value. With that principle in place, the combination I believe will shape the competitive cannery is clear: advanced automation, IoT —including artificial vision—, data science and industrial AI, working together rather than as isolated gadgets. Applied to the truly critical steps —thawing, cooking, cleaning and packing— that combination is a solid path to optimizing the whole production process. Robotics is part of that picture too. But the winning plant won’t be the one with the most technology; it’ll be the one that integrates the right technology, responsibly, around its process.
5. What separates a truly competitive tuna processing plant from one that simply produces volume?
Volume is easy to see. But the plants that ultimately win share one deeper trait: they can produce more cans of tuna from the same raw material, guaranteeing the quality of the tuna cake in every single one. Everything else you measure on a production line is, in the end, a sub-indicator that only matters to the extent that it converges on that one question. The mistake I see most often is teams optimizing a single indicator in isolation and making decisions from it, without stepping back to see the whole. That almost always produces local wins and global losses. A truly competitive plant manages the system as a system, keeps the whole picture in view, and never loses sight of the indicator that really matters: good cans per quantity of tuna.
6. Without revealing anything confidential, could you share some insight into Hermasa’s strategic priorities for the coming years? Where do you see the biggest opportunities to help tuna processors become more efficient, automated and competitive?
Without going into anything confidential, our direction is very focused, and that focus is deliberate. Everything we’re building serves one goal: helping tuna and sardine canning plants get more from every fish, with less waste and full control of their process.
On the tuna side, that means intelligent equipment —our Smart Tunivac cooker, the Smart Tunipack packing machine with TunaCheck®, the Hermasa Cleaning Control intelligent cleaning-control system, or our quality-control system with artificial vision—and, above all, TunaView®, with its cooking, cleaning and canning modules. TunaView is built to do three things that translate directly into margin: maximize the saving per can produced; give the plant an exhaustive record of downtime —how much, and why—; and find the optimal operating parameters and configuration for each product, accounting for the raw material, its condition, the covering liquid, and so on.
On the sardine side, with our Flash Pack Pro we’re completing the full automation of the packing process with advanced robotics which —combined with the automatic cooking process we’ve had in place for years— will make our line the first in the world to produce canned sardine in a fully automatic way, end to end.
I want to be clear about our strategy: our focus is exclusively on tuna and sardine canning, and we intend to bring the full weight of these technologies to bear on those two products. That concentration is what lets us go deeper than anyone else.
BIGEYE NEWS · EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVE
The industrial race in tuna is shifting from automation alone to yield + process intelligence.
When raw material dominates the cost base, every gram recovered matters. When labor is tight, consistency matters. When customers demand proof, data matters.