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Smoked Fish Business Upscales With Automation

Hardy Buoys turns to an automated bagging line to meet increasing customer demands, saving $3,500 per week in labor.

The Plan It RotoBagger inside the Hardy Buoys facility includes a multi-head weigher, the RotoBagger, a pre-made pouch machine, with a platform and sanitary washdown inclined conveyor.
The Plan It RotoBagger inside the Hardy Buoys facility includes a multi-head weigher, the RotoBagger, a pre-made pouch machine, with a platform and sanitary washdown inclined conveyor.
Hardy Buoys Smoked Fish

Hardy Buoys Smoked Fish, founded in 1994 by Bruce and Carol Dirom, is a provider to major grocery store chains across Canada. Increased demand for its products has steered the company towards automating its packaging line.

The Plan It RotoBagger inside the Hardy Buoys facility includes a multi-head weigher, the RotoBagger, a pre-made pouch machine, with a platform and sanitary washdown inclined conveyor.The Plan It RotoBagger inside the Hardy Buoys facility includes a multi-head weigher, the RotoBagger, a pre-made pouch machine, with a platform and sanitary washdown inclined conveyor.Hardy Buoys Smoked FishThe first step was the purchase of a semiautomatic multi-head scale, which reduced labor from 14 people to six with the same production output.

Bruce Dirom, founder and president of Hardy Buoys, explained that before the pandemic, the company had been increasing sales but was struggling for three years to attract plant floor workers in spite of the high unemployment rate at its Port Hardy B.C. facility. This struggle only became more of a challenge as the pandemic emerged, so the company had to short some of its orders, restricting customer expansion. But as product demand continued to grow, Hardy Buoys had to embrace more automated solutions.

Dirom wanted to find a supplier with Canadian representation that had the parts and service support levels Hardy Buoys needed. While searching through a list of sales reps that he had dealt with in the past, Dirom came across Mark Evangelista, who was working with Plan It Packaging Systems, a provider of complete automated packaging solutions with representation in Canada. With Evangelista’s twenty-plus years of experience in the packaging industry and the confidence he showed in Plan It’s solutions, Dirom found a match.

“We expressed what we were doing with our current demands and what our future demands may be,” Dirom said. “We were probably doing 2000 packages a day and we expected we’d need to get to 5000 packages a day, so we got a machine that could do 10,000 packages a day.”

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