Is seafood frozen and packaged with nitrogen better? Here’s a brief look at why nitrogen is popular in food processing applications today — in particular for seafood — and a seafood-oriented example of success.
Food Frozen and Packaged With Nitrogen Is Better
As we mentioned in a prior blog post, “What Makes Foods Frozen With Nitrogen Better?1”, there are many reasons that make nitrogen a superior freezing method to mechanical freezing. But for CalOx, the top four reasons include:
- Nitrogen is faster at freezing.
- Nitrogen produces a higher-quality product.
- Nitrogen reduces microbial growth.
- Nitrogen can streamline operations and save money.
To read more and to explore sources and industry reports, click on that link above. Now, on to the subject of seafood.
Gaseous Nitrogen Preserves Fish Quality During Packaging
Gaseous nitrogen is used in a process called modified atmosphere packaging (MAP), which helps preserve the quality of the seafood you are freezing. Basically, MAP is a preservation technique, and it works best with “minimally processed foods,” including seafood and fish products. From wild-caught salmon to halibut to shrimp, gaseous nitrogen is proving successful in preserving fish that customers want to buy again and again.
According to American Chemistry Magazine2, the purpose of the MAP technique is “to change the composition of the air around the food” because seafood can spoil through many ways including oxidation, microbial growth, moisture loss, discoloration and more. “By replacing the breathable atmosphere in a package with a pure gas or a gas mixture (such as) nitrogen, the shelf life of products can be significantly extended, helping them look, smell, and taste good far longer than they would otherwise.”
Seafood packaged using nitrogen, for example, preserves product texture and color, which is an important part of maintaining the quality, especially when customers are purchasing high-dollar products such as seafood.
Meet Custom Pack in Mississippi: Success Freezing Shrimp
What methods is your business currently using to freeze and/or package its seafood products? And more importantly, are they effective? Meet Custom Pack in Biloxi, Mississippi — one of the centers for the shrimp packaging industry, located in the Gulf of Mexico.
Over time, Custom Pack switched methods for packaging and eventually freezing their shrimp products. They moved from canning their shrimp to exploring different freezing techniques (this included cryogen straight tunnel freezers). Eventually, the company settled on cryogenic technology with a nitrogen-based immersion freezer to process individually quick-frozen (IQF) shrimp.
What were the results? This new nitrogen-based freezing method was a huge success for the company. As it turns out, nitrogen is particularly “well suited” for shrimp, a wet and fleshy seafood. So not only did the quality of the product delivered to the customer improve, but Custom Pack’s production rate also improved. As a result of making the switch from cryogen straight tunnel freezers to using nitrogen to freeze their seafood, their production capacity increased from 5,000 to 8,000 pounds per hour. Now that’s success that you can count on.
To learn more about CalOx’s nitrogen products, or contact us today.
1. https://caloxinc.com/blog/what-makes-foods-frozen-with-nitrogen-better/
3. https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-and-the-role-of-oxygen-in-palliative-care-at-home/