For those who love fresh seafood and in particular lobsters, have you ever wondered how it arrives from ocean to plate, fresh and packed full of flavour? 

Our AMI team in South Africa are specialists in perishable shipping and export tonnes of seafood around the globe. Christina Adams, AMI Branch Manager for Cape Town explains how the process for exporting live lobsters works. 

“The lobsters are caught around the coastal waters of South Africa by local fishermen and women. They are received at the processing plant and placed into fresh seawater holding tanks, where seawater is pumped through UV filters straight from the sea.

“Ahead of export, the live lobsters are graded into sizes and purged for four days before export. In the purge tanks, the lobsters destress and eliminate any waste from their systems. 

“For airfreight export, the live lobsters are transported in polystyrene boxes. They are carefully placed on clean wood shavings together with frozen coolant containers, which will keep them at a perfectly consistent temperature during flight.

“The boxes are delicately sealed, weighed, and labelled ready for export and quickly transported to our warehouses in Johannesburg or Cape Town, where they are kept for a short time in our large and modern refrigeration facilities. The final step is being loaded onto aircraft and shipped off to popular consumer markets of Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Dubai, Vietnam, and Europe.”