In the area of dried seafood processing, most of seafood producers use heat and fan to dry seafood. However, dusts and toxic gas from fuel spoil seafood and reduce product quality.

At the Ba Ria Vung Tau Seafood Processing Import – Export Joint Stock Company (Baseafood), seafood is dried with steam that guarantees product quality and lowers production costs.

The company uses an oven which can dry tonnes of seafood which will be exported to difficult markets of Russia, Ukraine and other European countries.

This technology has many advantages. Drying room is completely tight, therefore, seafood is isolated from fuel and is not spoiled. Especially, according to this technology, remaining heat can be withdrawn or adjusted based on different products through the heat supply equipment. Thus, apart from assuring product quality, drying seafood with steam reduces 10 times energy costs compared to traditional technologies.

This technology includes three parts: heat generating equipment, heat transferring equipment and heat distributing equipment. Among these equipments, heat generating equipment (including furnace and boiler) plays the most important part which guarantees safety and economic value of the system.

Since this technology was applied, Baseafood has saved tens thousand Vietnamese Dongs per month on energy. Drying one tonne of seafood with gas costs VND3 million per month while this technology requires VND300,000 to dry one tonne of seafood. The investment capital for the technology is only several ten million Vietnamese Dongs.

By Thuy Tien