Fisheries & Aquaculture

Nowadays, in general, all the crabs processed in Brazil are produced clandestinely and there are few national companies, legal and with SIF (Federal Inspection Services) producing the species at the present time. The few brands that display the product on the national market, label holders approved by the Ministry of Agriculture, inadvertently buy the raw material already processed by clandestine informal beneficiaries and only pack it. In the last decades, some equipment for the processing of crabs has been patented, but none is intended for the extraction of the dried meat of the crabs, that is, all have as their end result the crab pate (wet meat). The developed prototype provided a more efficient alternative in the extraction of crab meat in relation to traditional techniques of purely manual extraction and Mechanically Separated Meat (CMS). Manual extraction is practiced by the national processors, whose productivity is low and the operational cost high, preventing Brazil from exporting the product to demanding countries, such as the USA and China, and even increasing domestic consumption. The extraction of CMS is already carried out, but the product obtained by this method (crab pate) does not meet the internationally required specifications nor by the domestic market. The developed prototype results in two distinct products, the crab pate and the dried meat. The extraction of the dried meat, by means of the principle of the generation of vacuum and without crushing it, that is to say, maintaining the natural fibers, added a greater value to the product, reduced the cost of the process and made possible the export. In this way the general goal of this prototype was to develop a new method, based on new technology, for the extraction of crab meat, capable of replacing the traditional fleshing practiced in Brazil, unproductive, slow and costly.