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Like them or loathe them (or, if you want, remain indifferent to them), fish fingers are one of the success stories of modern food manufacturing. But where, exactly, do they come from?

The Belgian newspaper Le Dernière Heure has been visiting and talking to Frozen Fish International in Bremerhaven, a major supplier of fish fingers to the continent's largest marketer of the dish, Unilever.

Iglo, owned by Unilever and Europe's leading brand of fish fingers

 
The really naive, La Dernière Heure says, might believe that they just fish them out of the water the way they appear on your plate. For children the world over, they are as precious as gold ingots. While not quite that valuable, they are certainly one of the all time success stories of modern food manufacture.

These 'batonnets de poisson', as they are known in French, 'fish fingers' as the English call them or 'fishsticks' as they are called in Belgium, are practically all prepared by Frozen Fish International in Bremerhaven, in the north of Germany.

The factory has a floorspace of 25,000 square metres, La Dernière Heure says, and employs over 900 people. It is the largest frozen fish processing plant on the planet, with 75,000 tonnes of fish passing through its doors each year, to be transformed into a range of products. 'Fish fingers' are its speciality.

A billion units per year

"We produce a billion units per year", Florian Baumann, in charge of quality at the Unilever-owned Frozen Fish International, tells the paper. "If you put them end to end, they would stretch around the earth more than twice". The factory's principal customer is Iglo, also a division of Unilever.

The fishsticks 'adventure', says La Dernière Heure, is above all a story of water. Enormous factory ships head off to the four corners of the world to net their catch, with their principal target being Alaskan pollack, also known as coley.

No sooner pulled from the water, the fish is sorted, killed and filleted, all there and then on the boat. Within two hours te fillets have been frozen. "We freeze the fillets in blocks", Baumann tells La Dernière Heure. "The fillets are frmed into rectangular shapes and pressed, before being deep frozen. When the ship returns to port, it unloads its 600-tonne cargo".

There is, it appeaes, nothing left to chance. In addition to their legendary punctuality, La Dernière Heure says, these German engineersn are also very rigorous. Each block must weigh 7.484 kilos and measure 627mm x 254mm x 82mm. A tolerance level of 1mm is allowed!

Once inspected, the fillet blocks must meet 40 quality criteria. Once all these have been fulfilled, the blocks are cut into the characteristic small stick shapes before being passed along on a conveyor belt to receive their coating.

One amusing note, La Dernière Heure says, is that fish fingers destined for Germany are coloured a much brighter orange than those consumer in Belgium, to meet local tastes. At the end of the process, the sticks pass through a heat tunnel to be precooked at 190 degrees centigrade, before being cooled at -40 degrees centigrade. Not long afterwards, they are slipped into boxes and placed on palettes. 250 boxes of 'fish sticks' come out of this process every minute, or 4.5 tonnes per hour. Who said they weren't 'gold ingots'?