ROI & Savings — Seafood

A generator is a capital purchase that replaces a recurring cost. In seafood the recurring cost is usually larger than the owner expects, because it is spread across chlorine for water, sanitiser for surfaces, and an ice and water operation that nobody costs as a sanitation line. This page builds the case the way a processor’s finance team will want to see it.

What to count today

Pull twelve months of invoices — a full season, not a quarter — then add the costs that never appear on a chemical invoice.

What to count with a generator

• One-off: the system, installation, feed-water treatment, holding tank, pumps, distribution to the line and to the ice plant, plus commissioning and training.
• Ongoing: food-grade salt or ready-mixed brine, water, electricity, replacement filters, service parts, and test strips or photometer reagents.

Distribution to the ice plant is the line most often left out of a first estimate, and it is often the largest single piece of the install in a seafood plant.

The model

Three numbers: A, the annual cost today that the generator replaces; B, the annual running cost with the generator; C, the one-off cost. Annual saving is A − B, payback is C ÷ (A − B), and five-year net is 5 × (A − B) − C. If A is not comfortably larger than B, a generator is not the answer for that plant, and we will say so.

A worked example

Hypothetical figures for a mid-size processor running a filleting line and an ice plant, with a pronounced season, to show the method. Your audit uses your invoices and utility rates.

How sensitive is it?

Holding the one-off at $68,000 and running costs at $11,000 a year:

Below roughly $25,000 a year of replaceable spend, a full system with distribution to an ice plant is hard to justify on chemistry alone, and a smaller unit serving the highest-volume tasks is usually the better answer. Above it, the question becomes how to size and install rather than whether.

Seasonality changes the shape of the case

Most sanitation business cases assume a flat year. Seafood rarely has one. Chemical spend peaks exactly when landings peak, which is also when storage is tightest, labour is scarcest and a run-out is most expensive. A generator converts that peaky variable cost into a fixed asset cost plus a small variable one, and it removes the failure mode where the programme degrades in the busiest fortnight of the year.

Two practical consequences. Size for the peak week, not the average, or plan a holding tank and accept the storage time. And when you model the saving, model it by month rather than annually — the cash-flow picture is often more persuasive than the total.

Shelf life, the line nobody counts

In a chilled fish business, a day of shelf life is margin. It shows up as fewer short-code writedowns, fewer customer credits, wider distribution radius and better fill rates on the days that matter. Published work looking at treated ice and wash water from this angle includes sanitised ice on fish fillets and in the melt water, electrolysed water ice and the quality of shrimp and shelf life of King George whiting and Atlantic salmon fillets — research under each study’s own conditions, not a claim for our systems.

The way to include it honestly in a business case is to measure it: run a shelf-life comparison in the pilot, before and after, on the same species and the same route to market. A measured day is a number the finance team can use; an asserted day is not.

Building the business case

1. Twelve months of invoices, by product and volume, covering a full season.
2. The task list: area, method, volume per use, frequency.
3. Ice and chilled-water volumes, and the chlorine demand measured in each.
4. Time-and-motion on receiving, storage and dilution, weighted for peak.
5. Utility rates for water and electricity.
6. Install location, water supply, drainage, power, and the route to the line and the ice plant.
7. The tasks that must stay on a registered product.
8. Quality, hold and shelf-life records that touch sanitation.

The free sanitation audit assembles this into a written model, sizes the system, and tells you when a generator is not the right answer. Leasing turns the one-off into a monthly payment for US businesses, which suits a seasonal cash flow.

Two other shapes

Not every seafood business is a mid-size processor with its own ice plant. Two other patterns come up constantly.

The small day-boat or artisan processor. One line, a handful of staff, perhaps $15,000 a year of replaceable spend and ice bought in rather than made. A full system with distribution rarely pays back quickly here. The sensible options are a smaller unit serving the two or three highest-volume tasks, a ready-to-use registered product for anything needing a documented claim, or leasing to convert the capital cost into a monthly payment that tracks the saving.

The multi-site group. Several plants, each spending $25,000–45,000, often with one ice-heavy site and several lighter ones. Run the model per site: the ice-heavy site almost always justifies a system first, and the group benefit comes from standardising SSOPs, logs and training across all of them — which is frequently worth more than the chemical saving at the smaller sites, because customer audits stop producing different answers at different plants.

Where the saving shows up

Finance teams reasonably ask where the money appears. Chemical spend falls on the sanitation and consumables lines, and freight and disposal fall with it. Salt, water, electricity and service appear as new, smaller lines. Labour usually does not fall as headcount; it shows up as time returned to tasks that were being squeezed at peak. Space is a soft saving until the site needs the room, at which point it is very real. Quality effects — shelf life, downgrades, credits — are the hardest to attribute and often the largest, so measure them during the pilot rather than claiming them afterwards.

Frequently asked questions