How to fillet a Tilapia fish: types of trimmings

Do you have Tilapia in your product portfolio? Then, it is essential that you know what type of trimmings exist for the fillets.

To the novice eye the differences can be subtle and therefore not very relevant. However, as a Tilapia marketer, it is necessary to know how to identify the differences that exist because they affect both the quality of the final product and the commercial margin.

In Tilapia processing plants, the production begins with filleting each fish in two parts. Check it out in this video:

When the fish is divided, it can be cut with thetrimming requested by the client. There are three different ways to do it:

• Untrimmed
• Normal trimmed
• Well trimmed

If the Tilapia fish is Untrimmed means that a double cut is made at the height of the central spine and near the head in order to extract the spines. You can see it in the following photo:

Normal trimmed is the most commercialized way of filleting it. In this case, another cut is made on the side of the Tilapia that would correspond to the top of it. This is where the dorsal fin is located and, this way, the cartilage is removed:

The last type of cut is the Well trimmed one. It is the most thorough and is used to achieve a premium product. The Tilapia processor not only removes all the cartilage from the top of the fish, but also the cartilage from the bottom where the anal fin is located. In addition, approximately 1 cm of the belly is also trimmed:

This last type of more precise and detailed trimming achieves a higher-quality product, since the fillet is completely clean.