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.
“This is really exiting for us!” says Cees de Boer from the URK Fish Auction. “Where we up to now 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.