The Customer
Seacatch provides a wealth of production services to the seafood industry including product freezing, poaching, grading, glazing, bandsawing, packing and labelling. The firm currently handles around 100 metric tonnes of seafood products per week for leading fish suppliers and many blue chip clients.
The Requirement
Seacatch wanted to upgrade from a manual blast freezing process by investing in a fully automated in-line system for protective glaze hardening and full freezing of wet fish fillets. The Solution Starfrost purpose designed a versatile multi-belt freezing system for Seacatch.
The Hybrid features three 1.4m wide product belts within a 6.5m enclosed freezing tunnel. The conveyor belts are manufactured from close mesh stainless steel to provide excellent product support and reduce marking. Seacatch’s Hybrid is designed for rapid full freezing of wet fish fillets and glaze hardening to protect and add value to seafood products.
The system has a maximum product capacity of 300kg per hour for freezing and 1,000kg per hour for glazing. Each of the three product belts on the Seacatch system can be operated independently at different speeds or configured to work together on a cascade principle. This gives Seacatch the flexibility to process a variety of different products by making simple adjustments to belt configuration and speed. Starfrost’s Hybrid freezer has enabled Seacatch to increase product quality and throughput, boosting related business by around 40%.
Simon Chapman, Director, Seacatch “The Hybrid freezing tunnel has been a real benefit to our company. It has allowed us to increase capacity through our factory and offer an even higher quality product to our customers. The system’s flexibility, ease of use and very competitive price were key factors in our decision to with Starfrost.”
Seacatch UK – Inline IQF Tunnel for fish fillets