Ocean Perfect wants to change the way the seafood industry transports live shellfish.
Transporting live marine animals has always been tricky. Handling the animals adds stress, while disease can quickly build up in cramped containers. The stressful, potentially dangerous environment means companies are forced to ship live animals as fast as possible to avoid high mortality rates.
“The mortality rate that we have in shipping crustaceans is quite high, quite expensive, so that was really the impetus behind putting this together,” Ocean Perfect CEO Andrew Lively told SeafoodSource. Lively formerly worked as the global vice president of marketing for True North Seafood, a division of Cooke Inc.
Based in St., New Brunswick, Canada, Ocean Perfect claims its new BlueVita Technology can transport live marine animals with less stress and less mortality.
“This is a technology to transport live aquatic animals,” Lively said, showing off the technology at the company’s St. Andrews location. “Today it’s being used to transport king crab … for about a three-day journey. [It will] hold the animals live from northern Norway to Oslo and then on to Europe.”
The solution is deceptively simple.
Crabs, lobster, oysters, or some other species of shellfish are placed on trays which are then lowered into large blue barrels full of water and stacked until the barrels are full. The blue barrels are then loaded onto a shipping container outfitted with the BlueVita Technology and plugged into the system. Each barrel can hold a different species of animal, allowing shippers to mix and match what products they want to transport instead of simply filling the entire shipping container with one product.
“What the system does is that it provides air for the animals to stay alive,” Lively said. “We’ve developed a technology to take the gases out of the water. It used to be that the biofilter system would be the size of a dump truck, but now we’ve got a system the size of a golf bag.”
Customers are then able to track their shipping containers’ location and system information remotely in real time throughout the journey.
The big challenge was finding a solution that could inject oxygen into the water while removing harmful substances like waste, ammonia, and carbon dioxide that can build up during transport. Ocean Perfect looked to other industries with experience removing gases, such as the mining industry, to develop its system. The barrel shape of the containers helps with water flow, Lively said, ensuring that there are no dead spots where diseases can build up.
“Red Lobster doesn’t serve live lobster because there’s nothing like this out there. Cruise ships don’t serve live lobster because there’s nothing like this out there,” Lively said.
The Ocean Perfect system has less than 1 percent mortality after 17 days, according to research done by the Huntsman Marine Science Center, Lively said. Keeping the animals in water with less handling than traditional shipping methods also helps reduce stress, he added.
“This is a smarter way to ship your animals,” Lively said. “You get significantly less mortality and the mortality difference alone will pay for the system, but the other enhancement is that you’re not losing weight. It’s always in water … so the weight doesn’t go down and the flavor is fantastic.”
The challenge is convincing customers to take the initial trial, Lively said, but the company is already making progress on that front.
“The other good thing about what we have going in is the investors,” Lively said. “We have investors in Europe. One is the owner of Unit 45, and they would be one of the largest container rental businesses in Europe. The other is Kotra, and they are one of the largest seafood distributors in Europe, based in Holland. And they see the need, they’ve seen the transition … from throwing ice on fish to having refrigerated containers, frozen containers, and they see this live as sort of the next generation of what they can do.”
Funding from the Canada’s Ocean Supercluster has helped the company develop and perfect its product and sign up its first customers. Ocean Perfect has about a dozen BlueVita Technology shipping containers rolled out already, but the company is eager to scale up. Lively said the company is hoping to have 100 containers in use within the next three years.
“The people that are early adopters and can see the advantage of improving the quality of the animals are the ones that we’re looking for, and they’re out there,” Lively said. “So we’re just getting started, and I would say the response has been very, very positive.”
Photo by Nathan Strout/SeafoodSource
