PicoICE Made from Seawater Introduced to Alaska Fisheries

When the f/v Seabrooke begins fishing out of Akutan in the Aleutian Islands in January, plans are for the Circle Seafoods vessel to be equipped with the technology to turn seawater into tiny ice crystals that form a protective slurry around the Pacific cod catch.

The Aberdeen, Wash. processor’s focus on improving the quality and value of its catch will be enhanced by PicoICE. These very small ice crystals produced from sea water, surround the fish, largely stopping any bacterial action to the flesh by getting the core temperature of the fish down to 31-32 degrees Fahrenheit before the fish goes into rigor mortis.

“Our machines have worked all over the world,” Dan Strickland, the Alaska sales agent for Green Iceberg AS of Oslo, Norway, who was at the 2024 Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle Nov. 20-22 to introduce the cold chain control technology to harvesters and processors alike.

By deep chilling the fish, you can extend rigor by up to 50 to 60 hours, he said.

“This technology has been proven in Norway and the North Atlantic for over 20 years,” Strickland said. “PicoICE machines are scalable. They are using them on processing boats and a number of plants in Norway.”

“Processing plants are the lowest hanging fruit; a stationary plant in a nice clean room and control of the electricity is the easiest place to set these machines up,” he continued. “You can also put them on vessels that go out and catch the fish and have them on tenders as well. We can put them on Bristol Bay gillnetters.”

If the fish are bathed in PicoICE for an hour or two and then go into a freezer they’re already almost frozen, he said. Electric costs of freezing the fish can be dropped to two to three times as much than the cost of putting fish that are warm into a blast freezer, a big savings on electric expenses, he said.

“We have seen these machines are so effective that we have seen the return on investment in as little as 100 days to two years, and we have testimonials to that,” he said.

PicoICE technology itself is the work of Green Iceberg’s chief technology officer, Snaebjorn Tr. Gudnason. While the company has had some challenges in adapting its equipment to Alaska fisheries, it’s making progress, Strickland said.

Meanwhile, Strickland is already talking with processors who take the harvest chilled in refrigerated sea water or flake ice.

“You can keep fish in PicoICE up to two to three weeks and they will stay in a state of suspended animation,” he said. “You take that fish out of PicoICE and it looks like it was caught that day.”

While Circle Seafoods will be testing the PicoICE chilling on cod, Green Iceberg is also interesting in a variety of other seafoods, including salmon, halibut and crab. The technology also works for beef, pork, vegetables; anything that needs chilling, he said.

PicoICE technology is already working in the North Atlantic, the Bering Sea and in Africa and Iran, he said.

“In Iran, where they are not next to the ocean, you can use fresh water dosed with salt,” he explained. “If the temperature of the water is warmer than we want, we use pre-chillers to drop the water temperature and you can control this to the temperature you want.”

Source: https://fishermensnews.com/picoice-made-from-seawater-introduced-to-alaska-fisheries/