Empowering Female Founders: Automating Australia’s Only Wild-Caught Scampi Caviar
Fish Girl is a startup founded by former chef Umar Nguyen, pioneering sustainable wild-caught scampi caviar harvesting. The business is focused on making seafood processing more ethical, efficient, and globally competitive while creating a fully traceable, waste-free supply chain.
Challenge
Seafood provedore Umar Nguyen is Australia’s sole producer of wild-caught scampi caviar. The product is extremely popular with Australian chefs with Umar selling 3kg (150 x 25g tins) to customers each month.
Each batch requires 6kg of raw product to be carefully sorted by hand with tweezers to remove impurities. The laborious work (one kilogram takes between 5 and 6 hours to sort) has led to repetitive-style injuries (severely strained hands, shoulders, and back) and forced Umar to decline large and international orders in favour of maintaining current clientele.
what the arm hub did
Umar was one of six women to participate in the ARM Hub Technology Roadmap Accelerator for Female Founders. The accelerator identified Umar’s manufacturing challenges and created a personalised roadmap to implement solutions. A direct outcome of the accelerator was the development, adaption and implementation of a new machine to suit Umar’s purpose.
Following the success of the new machine, Umar is working with the ARM Hub to fully automate the process using computer vision.
The ARM Hub Female Founders accelerators have been supported by the Queensland Government and run in partnership with companies such VenturePro.
New APPROACH
During the Female Founders Accelerator, the ARM Hub team devised a new method for sorting the caviar. The ARM Hub used its engineering expertise to modify an aspirator used in dental surgeries to replace tweezers. This alternative has also paved the way for research and development on a first-of-type caviar sorting platform using computer vision to identify eggs, sort them and remove waste products.
