Ecuador shrimp farmer Songa boosts tech, efficiency

Songa plans to increase value-added production at its processing plant. Photo: Lola Navarro / IntraFish 

The company is introducing new freezing lines and cold systems, and increasing capacity. 

Ecuadorian shrimp producer Songa's expanded facilities will be running by next May with new cold systems and more efficient processing equipment, Miguel Cucalon, commercial director at the company, told IntraFish in a recent visit to the company.

Songa is implementing new machinery to help it better compete with other players in the industry. For example, it is adding an individually quick frozen (IQF) line, something that until now the company had not been keen to buy.

“The brined frozen shrimp is not the best quality but the market is demanding it more and more, especially in Asia, and we have decided to buy one machine,” Cucalon said.

The IQF system reduces the freezing time from between four and six hours to around 40 minutes.

In addition to this line, Songa will have a new sorting machine with double exit. The current plant has three sorters, two with double exit and one with single exit, which will also be upgraded to double efficiency.

“At the moment we don’t have enough space to process our production, which forces us to use third-party plants to meet demand, but the expansion will be enough to supply our markets,” Cucalon said.

The vertically-integrated company has 7,500 farming hectares, and produces around 27,000 metric tons of product a year.

With the additional space at its processing plant it expects to increase production from the current 150 metric tons a day to 200 metric tons. It also plans to increase value-added production to around 20 percent of the total.

The plant will be at a constant temperature of about 10 degrees.

“It is an important investment and it is completely necessary for our operations; it has been delayed, but everything is going according to the plan now,” Cucalon said.

The company is currently supplying normal volumes of large sizes of shrimp after having struggled “like everyone else in the country,” to harvest big sizes during the first six months of the year.

Due to the unusual and very strong rains in the first half of 2017, shrimp farmers in Ecuador were forced to harvest early and sell small sizes, leaving some markets undersupplied.

Importers in China and important clients in South Korea such as Costco require larger sizes of shrimp under contracts that a company “cannot afford” to lose.

“There was a time were nobody had big sizes, in other occasions you can go and buy from other producers but in this case the problem was across the country” Cucalon said.

“In that kind of situation you have to make a decision and stop selling large sizes to smaller clients to continue to supply the big ones,” he said.

The rains stopped in June, while companies returned to normal harvests around September, picking up sales and supplying markets without problems.

“Shrimp exports have generally followed annual trends month-on-month, so you won’t see that there was a fall in shipments, but rather in sizes,” Cucalon said.

“Right now exports of big sizes are picking up again, the situation didn’t have any long-term effect because we continued to sell the product,” he said.