Recovery, and what a point of it is worth.

Recovery is the finished weight that came out of a run divided by the net round weight that went in. Net round is the landed gross less the tote tare and the ice, and finished is what the scale said at weigh out, added up across every grade. Both numbers are measured. Neither is assumed.

That is the whole formula, and it is not the hard part. The hard part is that the percentage on its own tells you almost nothing.

Why the percentage alone is not useful

A recovery of 60% is excellent for one product and poor for another. It moves with the species, the finished form, the season, the gear that caught it, how the fish was handled between the water and the door, the size grade, and how tired the crew on the line are at the end of a shift. Two plants running the same species to the same form will land on different numbers and both can be right.

So a recovery figure with nothing beside it is trivia. It becomes management information only when it is compared to something, and there are three comparisons worth making.

One: against a target you actually own

Score the run against the recovery you expect for that species and that form, and report the variance in points. A run that came in a point and a half under target is a sentence a supervisor can act on. A run that came in at 60.0% is not.

The target has to come from your own weigh in and weigh out history, not from a reference table in somebody’s software. Published figures are a starting point for the first month and a liability after that, because they will quietly become the number your floor is judged against.

Two: against the grade mix

Two runs at the same recovery are not worth the same money if they graded out differently. Grades sell at different prices, so what you want beside the recovery is the weight in each grade, its share of the finished product, and the blended price per pound that falls out of the mix. A run that recovers well into low grades can be worth less than a run that recovers badly into high ones.

Three: against what the round product cost

The figure that actually decides whether a run made money is the lot value less what the round product cost at the shore price. Divide that by the round pounds and you get a margin per pound of raw material, which is the only recovery-adjacent number an owner ever really needs.

A worked example

Take 9,200 lb of snow crab landed gross, with 260 lb of tote tare and 180 lb of ice. Net round is 8,760 lb. Run it to cooked sections / clusters at a target recovery of 60%.

One point of recovery on this one lot is $834.39. Not a season, not a plant. One lot, one run, one point. That is the number that makes people care about weigh out discipline, and it is the number almost nobody in a small plant can produce on the day.

Where the number usually goes wrong

Four things, in roughly the order they turn up. Tare and ice not deducted consistently, so the denominator is wrong and recovery reads low. Blended runs, where several input lots go into one run and the recovery is reported per run without keeping each input’s contribution, so nothing can be traced back afterwards. Co-products counted as loss, so crab meat extracted from sections makes a good run look bad. And rework counted twice.

There is a fifth that matters more than it sounds: recovery that comes in above the physical ceiling for that product is not a win, it is a weigh in error, and the screen should say so rather than congratulating the line.

How to start, without buying anything

Weigh in properly for one month. Every tote, tare and ice deducted the same way every time, written down against the lot. Weigh out by grade at the end of every run, on the same scale, by the same rule. Put both in a spreadsheet with one row per run and work out the four figures above. You will learn more in that month than any software will tell you in a year, and if you then decide you want it on a screen on the floor, you will arrive with your own targets instead of somebody else’s.