On the Prepared Seafood lobster processing plant in Saco on Might 19, about 250 employees have been stationed alongside an enormous processing system that kills, butchers, types, cooks, extracts, freezes and packs 100,000 kilos of lobster per day.

Above the clatter of the manufacturing line is a futuristic higher chamber that homes a $2.5 million high-pressure processing machine, the cornerstone of the brand new plant, which was in-built 2019. That day, claws and knuckles have been being carried up from the bottom ground by a conveyor belt and dropped into the highest of a two-story vertical metal cylinder that hangs from a runner on the ceiling.

As soon as the big cylinder is full, a employee pulls it alongside the runner to a gap within the ground to a vault, and lowers it inside. A rolling lid meeting slides over robotically, seals shut, and the vault fills with water. Then the strain is cranked up, holds, after which drops again down over a four- to five-minute cycle.

The high-pressure course of, which at the very least three Maine lobster processors now use, opens up new product choices, saves customers effort in eradicating meat from shells and cuts down on labor on the processing plant.

“It by no means ceases to amaze me, beginning out as a child hauling traps by hand,” stated Curt Brown, marine biologist at Prepared Seafood. “It’s a extremely neat piece of apparatus. That is the long run.”

Brown, who has a grasp’s diploma in marine biology and coverage from the College of Maine and a decade of expertise working on the Gulf of Maine Analysis Institute, was employed seven years in the past as a part of Prepared Seafood’s resolution to department out into science with a deal with high quality and sustainability. Brown has introduced Prepared into a number of industry-science partnerships with the state Division of Marine Assets, UMaine and different academic establishments, and he does academic outreach to public faculties in Maine.

“You add worth by creating new merchandise and investing within the know-how like high-pressure processing that lets you create new merchandise and make lobster extra interesting to extra folks world wide,” Brown stated.

Stay lobsters enter a high-pressure processing station at Greenhead Lobster in Bucksport on Might 10. The corporate says it’s cleaner and extra humane towards the lobsters than conventional processing. Derek Davis/Workers Photographer

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Over the previous couple of years, extra Maine lobster processors have been making the shift to high-pressure processing know-how since Richmond-based Shucks Maine Lobster pioneered it within the state in 2006. The know-how, initially developed in Spain as a chilly pasteurization approach to increase the shelf lifetime of conventional cured hams often called Jamon Serrano, applies water strain of as much as 87,000 kilos per sq. inch to meals merchandise, killing microorganisms with minimal results on style, texture and dietary worth, with out the necessity for preservatives.

When lobsters are processed this fashion, the excessive strain additionally breaks the membrane connecting the meat to the shell, permitting uncooked meat to be extracted, which was not doable earlier than. The unfamiliar, translucent, gelatinous purple meat could not look significantly appetizing, however processors say it opens up many potentialities for brand new and modern preparations.

Cooks have been experimenting with new lobster dishes on their menus, and Prepared Seafood has been providing tutorials for recipes utilizing “cold-cracked” uncooked lobster on its Instagram account, from crispy fried lobster meat to lobster carbonara.

It’s also a extra humane strategy to kill lobsters than boiling them alive. Since the UK acknowledged lobsters as sentient, this has been extra on the minds of customers. Prepared Seafood runs the lobsters via an electric-shock stunner simply after they’re unloaded after which both butchers them first or pressurizes them entire.

Individuals for the Moral Therapy of Animals has beforehand endorsed electrocution and high-pressure processing as humane methods to kill lobsters, however at the moment it’s selling veganism over any consumption of seafood.

“Whereas the high-pressure killing of lobsters could also be barely much less merciless than boiling these delicate animals to demise or ripping them aside, as revealed in PETA’s eyewitness exposés, what lobsters really need is to stay in peace,” stated PETA Senior Liaison Sofia Chauvet, including that individuals can get pleasure from vegan seafood replacements.

The high-pressure processing makes selecting each uncooked and cooked lobster meat simpler, lowering labor wants. Nonetheless, Prepared Seafood recruits employees from world wide to satisfy its wants within the harvest season, using 250 a day at its Saco plant and about 75 at its stay lobster facility on the Portland waterfront.

Staff course of cooked lobsters at Greenhead Lobster in Bucksport on Might 10. The high-pressure course of makes it simpler to take away shells, which saves cash on labor prices. Derek Davis/Workers Photographer

SMALL BATCH, HIGH PRESSURE

Whereas Prepared Seafood processes thousands and thousands of kilos of lobster a yr at its new plant, the know-how additionally has been embraced on smaller scales.

For the previous 25 years, Greenhead Lobster has specialised in Stonington stay lobster, which it ships world wide. In 2019, amid commerce wars and excessive tariffs, it branched into processing with the development of a brand new plant in Bucksport and funding in a horizontal high-pressure processing system made by Spanish producer Hiperbaric.

“It was a giant resolution,” proprietor Hugh Reynolds stated concerning the $2.7 million system. “One factor concerning the machine is we wouldn’t be capable of try this many a day. It slows the method down slightly bit, however we have been OK with that as a result of we simply needed to deal with high quality and never a lot quantity. Now we completely imagine in that course of.”

Processing about 30,000 kilos a day and round 5 million kilos a yr, Greenhead doesn’t produce as a lot quantity because the bigger processors however focuses on small-batch, absolutely traceable Stonington lobster introduced in from Deer Isle. In shoulder seasons, it purchases some lobster from Canada however doesn’t course of Maine and Canadian lobster collectively on the identical day. Throughout this month’s web site go to, it was processing 148 crates of lobster that had been shipped the 40 minutes from its Stonington dock.

As soon as unloaded, lobsters are inspected for liveliness after which positioned into small cylinders slightly greater than a bread field, onto a conveyor belt that carries them into the pressurizer. Inside, 5 high-pressure pumps convey the strain as much as a degree just like that discovered at depths of the Mariana Trench, Reynolds stated, which kills the lobsters immediately, in addition to microbes that may trigger spoilage.

From there, they proceed into the processing line, the place tails are eliminated and legs and our bodies separated. Uncooked tails move via a liquid nitrogen freezer. On cooking days, the claws go into the cooker and move into the clear room for ready-to-eat merchandise. On different days, the claw and knuckle meat are extracted uncooked and packaged on the market to distributors and eating places.

David Rowland places crates of stay lobsters into the chilly seawater after a ship got here in to Greenhead Lobster in Stonington on Might 10. Derek Davis/Workers Photographer

Reynolds stated the choice to department into processing was prompted by being given a chance to promote frozen lobster tails on the QVC house buying community. He employed a processor for the quick time period and commenced researching completely different processing choices.

“I bought actually centered on attempting to create a frozen lobster tail expertise that was just like consuming lobster on the dock in the summertime,” he stated. “That was the imaginative and prescient, to take great-tasting Stonington lobsters however make them extra available as a result of stay lobster was getting increasingly more sophisticated.”

He lastly settled on high-pressure processing as a result of it prolonged shelf life, made extraction simpler for each employees and the patron, and preserved meat high quality. Greenhead advertises an 18-day shelf life for contemporary meat, which helps eating places not have to fret a lot about utilizing it straight away.

Some folks stated Reynolds was loopy to construct the processing plant in Bucksport due to the issue discovering employees within the space, however the ease of meat extraction with excessive strain meant extra may very well be processed with smaller groups. Greenhead employs about 75 to 80 employees and was in a position to fill the roles with out utilizing international visa holders.

Steph Lindsay, director of gross sales and advertising for Greenhead, stated the corporate did market analysis and located that getting meat out of lobster tails was a ache level for its prospects. The high-pressure course of makes that simpler.

“It’s just like the stay lobster expertise with out the effort of the lobster cracker,” Lindsay stated. “We’ve been doing stay for thus lengthy, till we may do one thing like this, we didn’t wish to get into processing. It needed to be the fitting know-how to stay as much as our mission of constructing positive folks have been getting the very best quality Stonington lobster.”

Sternman Ben Foster unloads lobsters from the boat Sleepless Nights at Greenhead Lobster in Stonington on Might 10. Derek Davis/Workers Photographer

HUMANE AND TASTY DEATH

The truth that high-pressure processing kills lobsters immediately was additionally necessary to Greenhead.

Through the years, the group has been perfecting its dealing with course of to maintain stay lobsters stress-free from the boat to the patron. On the dock, every lobster is unloaded from the boat and goes up a ramp into a chilly water tank, then it will get graded and is held in one other saltwater tank.

Stay product is transported to Seabrook in New Hampshire, nearer to the airport, and saved in a soccer field-sized tank till it is able to be boxed and placed on a aircraft. Every tank is monitored to imitate very chilly ocean water as carefully as doable.

The corporate’s curiosity in lowering lobster stress began as an effort to scale back mortality in transport, however it has since developed because the group discovered about Japanese views of demise in meat and fish and the significance of instantaneous euthanization.

Research recommend that poor dealing with, storage in unnatural environments, and inhumane slaughtering strategies may cause animals to launch stress hormones and enzymes, which may be detrimental to meat high quality. Different research in animals present that consuming meals containing these hormones may cause the identical hormones to spike within the client.

“We didn’t wish to have the processing be one thing annoying after we’ve spent all that point (storing and transporting) on this proper-handling form of means,” stated Lindsay. “So the demise turns into tremendous necessary, and that’s the way in which we really feel about it. It’s a Japanese philosophy, however there’s analysis about this.”

The crew of the lobster boat Ellen Ada joke with David Rowland as he unloads lobsters at Greenhead Lobster in Stonington on Might 10. Derek Davis/Workers Photographer

It’s this facet of the processing that Reynolds and Lindsay want to convey to the general public.

“(Excessive-pressure processing) is a bizarre, esoteric, technical time period, and wholesalers get it however no person else actually does,” Lindsay stated, so he’s engaged on devising a greater time period for the idea for U.S. advertising functions.

He sees a connection to the Japanese “ike jime,” which refers to a means of slaughtering and dealing with fish that takes the animal’s welfare into consideration and is meant to protect meat high quality longer and improve the style. The strategy advocates killing a fish with a powerful blow to the pinnacle or spiking the mind inside a minute of eradicating it from the water as step one.

Whereas ike jime is a 200-year-old course of, high-pressure processing accomplishes a lot of its targets via know-how, and Maine lobster processors are seeing its potential so as to add worth to their merchandise.

“It’s such a standard {industry}. It’s the sort of know-how that allows us to continue to grow as an organization and as an {industry},” Brown of Prepared Seafood stated. “It’s our job to create worth. It’s actually what’s going to drive our {industry} ahead into the long run.”

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