Filleting yield: how much salmon you really sell from a whole fish
A whole fish turns into fillets, frames, trim and waste. Here is how to measure your yield and share the cost so each product shows its real margin.
You buy whole fish and sell fillets. The fish you paid for turns into several products, and some of it into waste. The question is what a kilo of fillet really costs.
Example: 20 kg of gutted salmon
Bought at £10 a kilo: £200. Filleting takes 1.5 hours at £12: £18. Total £218.
| Output | Kg | Share | Sold at | |---|---|---|---| | Fillet, skin on | 13.0 | 65% | £22.00/kg | | Heads and frames for soup | 5.0 | 25% | £1.50/kg | | Trim for fish cakes | 1.5 | 7.5% | £8.00/kg | | Waste | 0.5 | 2.5% | not sold |
Your yields depend on the fish, the cut and your knife. Weigh every output for a few batches and use the average.
Three ways to cost the fillet
Everything on the fillet: £218 ÷ 13 = £16.77 a kilo. Too high, because frames and trim bring in money too.
By weight: £218 ÷ 19.5 kg sold = £11.18 for every kilo. The fillet looks like a 49% margin, and you lose £9.68 on every kilo of frames.
By value: each output carries cost in line with what it sells for. The fillet costs £15.70 a kilo, frames £1.07 and trim £5.71. Every product earns the same 29%, the real margin of the whole fish.
Splitting by weight makes the fillet look better than it is. Price it from the value split, or you will cut the fillet price and wonder where the money went. If margin and markup get mixed up, read the difference explained.
What moves the margin
- Fillet yield. One point of yield on 20 kg is 0.2 kg of fillet, £4.40 in sales.
- Selling frames and trim instead of binning them.
The full pricing method is in our pricing guide.
How Lagom does it
In Lagom a breakdown turns one raw material into several products, each with its share of the input weight, plus waste. You choose to split the cost by weight or by market value, and every output gets its own cost per kilo. After each filleting you see the yield next to your plan.
More for fish processors: Lagom for fish producers.