December 2020 provided BAADER with another milestone on a side of our business not often spoken of. BAADER North America and BAADER Canada (BNAC) received orders that pushed the number of sold BAADER 2801 Crab Butchering machines to 104 units, in just six years of production.
The machine which entered its first year in production in 2015 has steadily grown to be considered by many processors to be the reliable work horse promoting better quality crab sections, higher yield and throughput over manual butchering, minimizing workplace injuries, and providing quick payback.
The machine started from a 2011 phone call from Bob Courage of BAADER Canada to Thorir Einarsson, former Managing Director BNAC (from 2011 to 2015) to come to Newfoundland, Canada to see if there was something that could be done to answer the call of Snow Crab processors in Atlantic Canada to provide a machine to assist with the labour-intensive process of butchering snow crab. Although BNAC had the predecessor, the CB801 Crab Butchering machine, it did not do well in sales and was prone to reliability issues, it was also quite aggressive in the butchering process.
Thorir travelled to Newfoundland to take a look at the CB801 and visited a couple of processors who employed its use. After some consideration he said “We can do better than this.” And from that moment the wheels began to turn, and work began to produce what we now know as the BAADER 2801. In August 2014 the machine was officially released to the markets. The BAADER 2801 is manufactured for BNAC by BAADER Kansas City, KS, USA.
2020 brought further development of the machine by BNAC product specialist; Clinton Smith, to be able to process another crab species; Dungeness. This development has resulted in sales of the machine for processing of that species.
Plans are in place to begin testing on other crab species in early 2021 to see if the current platform can be extended in terms of species and markets.
Snow Crab also known as chionoecetes is a very lucrative commodity. Once, only caught in the waters of Atlantic Canada and the Bering Sea around Alaska, and processed in those areas, the species is now found further north around Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Russia. This movement of the species has also contributed to the success of the BAADER 2801 opening up its requirement in these other countries as they begin to process at sea and ashore.
The BAADER 2801 is an automatic Crab Butchering machine which provides a small footprint and an emphasis on hygiene and safety. Production Supervisors have noted that they know what comes from the BAADER 2801 and what comes from the manual butchers – “the machine produces no rework; it is pack ready.”
The machine is a definite asset for the processor in reducing the labour-intensive process, repetitive strains and injuries on personnel, inconsistencies that exist with manual butchering as well as reducing clean-up time. It has a working range of carapace size between 95-150 mm and depending on the operator skills, ensures a throughput of 18 to 42 crabs per minute.
Picture credit: Natalia_Kollegova
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