AQUALIFE TERMINAL IN HOLLAND:
It is now a reality – the central receiving station and terminal for
live shellfish in Central Europe will be located at the URK Fish
Auction in Holland.
It will be in the town of URK that the
Aqualife containers in the future will be shipped into, and via which
place most of the European market can be serviced with day-fresh
shellfish from overseas and remote European fishing and production
grounds.
Located right between the major Maersk terminals in
Bremerhaven and Rotterdam, URK will be able to connect with all major
production clusters in the Northern hemisphere. Further to this, URK
is only hours away from Yerseke, Europe’s most important centre for
shellfish distribution.
The new terminal will be state of the art on closed circuit purification; it holds 50 tons capacity at any time.
“This is really exiting for us!” says Cees De Boer from the URK Fish Auction. “Where we up to now have mainly been focused on the Northsea fisheries, we can now add major producing countries like Canada to our product service area. We will be able to fully utilise our top modern cold-chain infrastructures, now also in support of shellfish producers and fisheries across the Atlantic, and not to forget the vast consumer markets across Europe.”
The terminal in URK will be built into the 45,000 m3 cold storage facility at the URK Auction - today Europe’s largest fish auction, and undisputable one of the most leading fish distribution centres in Europe.
The terminal will be able to handle up to 20 x 40 ft Aqualife
containers per week and have a storage capability of 50 tons at any
given time. It is not the plan that URK shall be used for long term
storage; the live shellfish will be shipped in, purified and forwarded
on directly to the packaging companies in Holland and beyond.
In order to accommodate the high standards of VWA (the Dutch
Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority), state of the art
purification technologies will be used – all water will be purified
down to 0.01 Microns before it is re-circulated in the tank systems.
“The terminal represents the final design of closed circuit
Aqualife terminals. We hope this design will set new standards in
animal and food safety, when it comes to storage of live seafoods”,
says Lars Nygaard Jepsen, COO of Aqualife. “There are in particular
challenges with regard to wet storing of bivalves, which we have
successfully overcome by this important step forward”, Lars Nygaard
Jepsen concludes.
The URK Auction house is one of the largest in Europe.
URK
is situation mid between the container ports Bremerhaven and
Rotterdam. From there, URK can reach cities like London, Paris,
Frankfurt and Milan with day fresh shellfish from across the Atlantics.