In general, breaders are not specialists, but perform other 

 processing operations as well. Some of them pack frozen shrimp in insti- 

 tutional packages and handle other specialties. Their freezing operations 

 are often performed by custom freezers but they use their o\m facilities 

 for packaging and shipping. Usually the freezing plant is located adja- 

 cent, or in very close proximity, to the breading plant. 



On the basis of visits to five establishments the First Research 

 Corporation concluded that plant facilities, for the most part, had been 

 adapted to their present use rather than originally constructed for the 

 processing of frozen breaded shrimp. Plant layout, therefore, has been 

 greatly influenced by the physical limitations of the buildings. 



As a result, a considerable amount of unnecessary handling and 

 transporting takes place during processing. Examples cited are the av^k- 

 ward location of refrigeration space in relation to receiving and shipping 

 facilities as well as the illogical location of the final operation of 

 mastering in relation to the cold-storage area. 



Mechanization in the plants studied was limited principally to 

 conveyor systems for transporting product between operations, the mechan- 

 ical grading of raw shrimp, and the automatic wrapping of cartons. One 

 company used hand-fed machine peelers and deveiners; in another, mechan- 

 ical splitting and deveining machines were employed after hand-peeling. 

 The extent to which manual operations still predominate in this sector 

 of the industry is demonstrated by the fact that machine operations in 

 the sample of five plants accounted only for 3-1/2 to less t)ian ik per- 

 cent of total man-hours consumed. The reason for this lop-sided depend- 

 ence on manual labor is the absence of mechanical procedures for some — 

 or all--of the following operations: Peeling, deveining, breading, and 

 packing. 



When attention is focused on the productivity of labor in the 

 plants surveyed, substantial differences in man-hours required to produce 

 a given quantity of products are noted. Tiiese variations are due in part 

 to differences in methods and equipment employed. More importantly, they 

 are traceable to sharply varying degrees of skill and effort of the labor 

 force . 



Plant procedure . — Combining the best features of currently used 

 methods and equipment First Research Corporation arrived at the following 

 synthesized picture of breading plant operations: (see figure V - 60) 



1. Receiving: Hundred-pound boxes of shrimp are unloaded from 

 trucks and fed by means of a roller conveyor directly into a cold holding 

 room located adjacent to the receiving dock. 



277 



