An economic recovery plan is to be produced to support about 650 workers who are losing their jobs at two seafood factories.
Young's Seafood initially considered closing its Fraserburgh plant and Grantown-on-Spey smokehouse after the loss of a £100 million contract with Sainsbury's earlier this year.
Management then decided both sites will remain open but the workforce will be reduced from 900 to about 250.
The Fraserburgh taskforce held its first meeting today and agreed to work to secure alternative employment for affected workers and to continue to work with Young's to find alternative markets and secure further efficiencies.
The economic recovery plan will also consider how to create sustainable employment in the longer-term to mitigate the impact on Fraserburgh and surrounding communities.
The Fraserburgh taskforce includes representatives of Young's, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw), Scottish Enterprise, Skills Development Scotland, Aberdeenshire Council, local elected representatives and industry bodies.
Business minister Fergus Ewing, who chaired the meeting, said: "Young's Seafood has taken its decision and we are doing everything possible to support the workers and mitigate the impact on the town and the wider area.
"We are helping affected employees through our initiative for responding to redundancy situations, Partnership Action for Continuing Employment (Pace).
"Through providing skills development and employability support, Pace will aim to minimise the time individuals affected by redundancy are out of work.
"Since Young's first announced its plans, there has also been a significant amount of work led by Scottish Enterprise to help the company find efficiencies and explore new markets, which could lead to reduced costs and new contracts, aiding the future viability of the factory."
Young's has said it will continue to consult with employee representatives on the exact number and phasing of redundancies, with the majority likely to take place in early 2016.
Dominic Kerrigan, board director of Young's Seafood, said: "Following extensive review and engagement with all interested stakeholders, we confirmed last week the decision to keep open our Fraserburgh Watermill Road and Grantown-on-Spey facilities. This followed the decision by a major customer to transfer some of their business to a Rosyth-based supplier.
"Today's meeting was constructive and we are committed to working with the Scottish Government, and all other stakeholders on the taskforce to deliver the best possible support for our employees and the local community."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here