Catching Details: How Vision Systems Help Seafood Processors See More

Seafood quality is a different beast — because when you harvest wild catch, you never know what’s coming up in the net. Sometimes it’s fish or clams… and sometimes it’s a barnacle-covered telephone.

In this episode of Quality Lines, Winston sits down with John Garland, Director of Research & Development for Land-Based Operations at Clearwater Seafoods. John shares how 30 years of experience, spanning lobster biology, quality engineering, and implementation of inline machine vision, helped Clearwater transform wild variability into consistent, world-class quality. 

🔍 What You’ll Learn:

• What “quality” really means in seafood (hint: it shouldn’t smell “fishy”) 
• Why manual inspection can’t keep up with today’s processing needs 
• How Clearwater uses multispectral IR and X-ray systems to detect molt stage, shell fragments, wrong species, and foreign material 
• The data advantage of per-animal inspection and what it unlocks for harvest + storage decisions 

If you work in food quality, protein processing, or automation — this one’s packed with practical insights from the sea to the line.