Alpesca has a 12,000 square meter processing plant built on a 65.000m2 lot in Puerto Madryn, a town on the Atlantic shore at 1400 Km South of Buenos Aires in the heart of Patagonia.
The plant is the operational center. It has the facilities required to serve the fleet, raw material chill rooms, primary processing area, value added product manufacturing area, finished product cold rooms, packaging stores and other ancillary areas such as production silos and ice storage capacity, potable water tanks and effluent treatment plant.
The building also houses all the company’s service areas, administration, human resources, medical care, laundry, canteen, maintenance department and quality and development laboratories.

In the primary processing area every individual fish is transformed by a continuous flow system that allows maximum utilization and the generation of quality fit for a broad product range that includes different types of natural portions (loins and fillets) in retail and bulk presentations for the food service chains.
The plant was designed with two automatic graders and 6 processing flow lines where the fish is distributed according to size it is then filleted, skinned, trimmed and portioned, packed, frozen and conditioned for shipping.
The flow lines are controlled by a modern computer system that measures yields, volume and efficiency.

Approximately 800 operators work in this stage to process 80 tons of fish per day.

Finished products
A new section was built next to the plant and was specifically designed to process value added products. It was inaugurated in October 2006.

Alpesca’s value added products are manufactured using two different processing concepts, “flame grill” and “Steam fresh”. The two processes involve single or double freezing. The fish base is then enriched by adding gourmet choice sauces and complements to obtain an easy to cook and tasty product.
The plant is fitted with high technology equipment to manufacture, freeze, insert the products into primary and secondary packaging, pass them through a checkweigher, a metal detector and finally coded and labeled.
This new section has the flexibility to generate units of different weight ranging from 80 grams to 250 grams and to be bathed in different sauces. Production capacity is 20 million portions per year (3,400 tons).
Our manufacturing capacity produces according to customer specifications and international quality standards.

Technical details:

Built up area: 12.000 m2
Potable water storage: 1200 m3
Flake ice machine:
Production capacity: 140 ton/day
Storage capacity: 200 ton
Fresh raw material Chill rooms:
Number of chill rooms: 3
Temperature: 0º C
Storage capacity: 380 ton

Primary processing:
Automatic Grading: Capacity: 10.000 pieces/hour (Marel)
Filleting, skinning and defeating 11 lines (Baader – Trio)
Trimming - portioning: 6 flow lines (Marel)
Packing: 6 grading and parking line with check-weighing facility
Fish Blocks: 1 continuous line where blocks are knocked off the mold, and packed into master cartons, coded and labeled and passed through the metal detector.
Retail products: 3 packet sealing lines (Econopack sealers), coding and printing (Lynx), metal detection (Loma), shrink wrapper and final labeling
IQF products: 1 grading and packing line.

Freezing:
1 Spiral Freezer (Frigoscandia).
Capacity: 1.500 kg/h
Contact freezing tunnel (Nantong) fitted with a stainless steel belt. Capacity: 600 kg/h
7 plate freezers
Capacity: 190 molds of 7.484 kg x 2 hour cycle

Value added plant:
2 Sauce mixing equipment (8 nozzles, 2,200 applications / min)
1 Spiral Freezer (Frigoscandia), 1500 kg/h
1 De-molding line.
1 Flowpack equipment (Ulma ARTIC) de 120 u/min
1 2 head packet erector
1 Side packet sealer, linear system 90 u/min
1 Checkweigher
1 Small character printer/coder.
1 LOMA metal detector
1 3M Packet erector and sealer

Cold Storage Rooms:
Number of rooms: 2
Temperature: - 30º C
Capacity: 2.500 ton