Grieg Seafood Shetland

Established in 1992, Grieg Seafood is a salmon farming business based in Norway.

During 2007, local businesses Hjaltland Seafarms Ltd, Lerwick Fish Traders Ltd and Shetland Products Ltd became part of the organisation and more recently changed their name to Grieg Seafood Shetland. The business has activities on 39 farm sites in Shetland and employs around 160 people across the islands.

With the completion of the new hatchery at Girlsta in 2015, and an ever increasing reliance on the internet to monitor and access systems across the organisation, the company investigated how to achieve higher speed broadband.

Shetland Telecom assisted to install a new fibre optic cable which was laid across a field straight to the new hatchery building and has enabled the organisation to take advantage of state of the art technologies such as a site-wide camera system. The system can be monitored remotely – you can even watch the fish feeding from the Head Office in Bergen.

The fibre cable has provided other advantages such as the use of on-site video conferencing, ensuring a much more streamlined and cost effective approach to engagement and communication across the organisation, which also has a branch in Canada. The high speed broadband has also been used to aid remote feeding on the farm sites.

Jon Walden, the Hatchery Manager, says that the fibre cable has had a very positive impact on the business, not just for communication and monitoring, but also to access new software used by the organisation to make operations much more efficient.

Jon said: “Shetland Telecom has been absolutely fantastic to work with; they have a ‘can do’ attitude and are quick to find solutions”.