Live lobsters from Nova Scotia, Canada, are now being shipped to Europe by sea, a method of transport that considerably reduces the cost compared with airfreight, which had always been used. It also considerably reduces the carbon footprint, and this is becoming increasingly important in this day and age.
The first consignment of live lobsters to be sent by sea was delivered to a specially built facility at the fish auction market in Urk in the Netherlands in June, and shipments have been delivered there on a weekly basis ever since. Consignments are 4-5 containers holding between 20-30 tons of shellfish depending on the season.
Subject to the approval of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, lobsters will be followed by live oysters and other bivalves, which are seen to have huge potential for the European market.
The system for shipping live shellfish by sea was developed by Aqualife A/S of Denmark (see World Fishing, August 2008) in conjunction with major companies such as Promens, which produces the tanks in which the lobsters are transported, and Maersk which adapted its 40ft containers and handles the actual shipping.
Until the Aqualife system became a commercial reality, live lobsters were exclusively shipped by air and today almost 15,000 tons are airfreighted to Europe from North America annually.
Live lobsters are not the only seafood to be sent by air, of course. A whole range of usually, but not exclusively, expensive, and often exotic, fish and shellfish species are regularly airfreighted from the country where they are caught or harvested to the country where they are sold.
Airfreight has the distinct advantage of being very fast so species such as lobster can be sent live without having to be transported in special tanks, and other seafood species can be sent chilled without losing too much of their shelf-life.
Most of the live lobsters transported by air from North America to Europe go through the USA because this country has a more developed airfreight infrastructure than Canada. And this is the crux of sending seafood by air.
With few exceptions, such as in Alaska, seafood was never regarded as very important by the airline industry until relatively recently. Airlines never used to think twice about leaving boxes of seafood at ambient temperature – often very high – at airports while awaiting transfer to other flights, bumping consignments to later flights and generally not treating seafood as the highly perishable commodity that it is.
Fortunately attitudes are changing. It was reported earlier this year that Alaska Air Cargo is training its employees in how to handle consignments of chilled fish to prevent unnecessary spoilage.
For the seafood industry, there were practicalities to consider such as not being able to pack fish in wet ice because of the possibility of leakage during flights, what type of box or case to use to ensure that the contents were adequately protected for the handling they would receive, etc.
Here also a lot of work has been carried out to improve matters and seafood is now routinely airfreighted around the world so consumers are able to purchase a very wide range of species.
