Tastiest Catch: King Crab Counts on Carrier Transicold for Transport during Arctic Winter : Carrier Transicold Scandinavia is supplying specially designed refrigeration equipment to Norway King Crab AS to transport live king crab more than 2,000 kilometers during the depths of arctic winter, before being flown to dinner tables in France, the UK, the U.S., China and Japan, among others. Carrier Transicold, which operates in the UK as Carrier Transicold UK, is a part of UTC Climate, Controls & Security, a unit of United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX).
Norway King Crab AS, which is based in the northern fishing village of Bugoynes, selected Carrier Transicold’s Supra 850 Nordic Silent refrigeration unit for its new 20-tonne vehicles. The trucks can carry up to 7,000 king crab at a time, with a typical specimen weighing between 2-to 5-kilograms and having legs as long as 1.2 metres.
The Supra 850 Nordic system uses electrical and hot water heating to ensure it can operate in extremely low ambient temperatures, which can potentially plummet to minus 35 degrees Celsius during winter. This cold weather performance is matched with low noise emissions, enabling the Supra units to operate in noise-sensitive areas due to innovative design features that are exclusive to Carrier Transicold.
We’ve developed a unique method that allows us to keep our king crab in the optimum environment from the moment they are caught until they are delivered to restaurants around the world, said Svein Ruud, CEO, Norway King Crab AS. A key stage in this process is a long-distance journey by road to Oslo, during which the king crab must be kept at a temperature of between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius.
In winter months we face some of the toughest road and weather conditions in Europe, so we selected the Supra 850 Nordic Silent unit for its ability to operate in this extreme environment, coupled with its ability to not only cool, but to warm the loadspace during winter.
Norway King Crab AS uses a fleet of small boats to catch and transport crab to a special packing station in Bugoynes within two hours. There they are inspected, tagged for individual tracking and shipped to their final destinations in containers filled with water from the depths of the Barents Sea.
The Supra 850 Nordic is a high-performance unit delivering a refrigeration capacity of 7,810 watts at zero degrees Celsius, matched with airflow of 2,500 cubic metres per hour. The heating capacity reaches a comfortable 6,700 Watts, enabling transport in extreme temperature conditions. This combination of precise temperature management with conventional diesel technology contributes to enhanced cargo protection for extreme winter conditions.
The trucks also use the LinkItAll telematics system and Carrier Transicold’s DataCOLD 600 temperature recorders to capture the set point and air moisture within the loadspace, storing up to two years of data, which can be accessed via a secure online portal. This supports an expansive tracking system operated by the customer, with identity tags allowing individual crabs to be traced to their precise catch area and throughout the delivery process.
King crab is one of the finest seafood delicacies in the world and transporting them demands that a specific set of environmental conditions be maintained at all times, said Jan Hjertvik, Norway sales manager, Carrier Transicold Scandinavia. It’s testament to the breadth and performance of our Supra range that we have a system ideally suited to this task.
Norway King Crab AS is the only producer of king crab in the world certified by Friend of the Sea, a non-profit, non-governmental organisation whose mission is the conservation of the marine habitat. This certification recognises Friend of the Sea’s high quality standards, from sustainable resource use and secure tracking to animal welfare and environmental performance.
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