Fulton Steam Boilers Cut Cooking Time For Lyons Seafoods
Lyons Seafoods is one of the largest prawn and seafood processors in the UK, specialising in supplying the country’s leading supermarkets and food service groups with raw, freshly cooked, chilled, and frozen prawns and other speciality seafoods.
As part of a £3.5m expansion programme that has included the commissioning of a second processing line, the Warminster-based company has installed a fully packaged plant room from Fulton Boiler Works.
The plant room, which contains two dual-fuel RBC1250 boilers plus ancillary equipment, was manufactured at Fulton’s headquarters in Bristol and delivered to site as three modular skid mounted packages – one for each of the RBC1250 boilers and one for the ancillary equipment. The skids were then mounted onto a prepared concrete base, connected to site services and covered with a Quinshield composite housing.
Commenting for Lyons Seafoods, chief engineer Jim King says: “During the specification process we approached a number of boiler manufacturers but foundFultonto be very knowledgeable and professional in the way they reacted to our requests and questions.”
“The new processing and packaging line has improved the cooking process at Lyons and changed the way we operate. It will give us a competitive edge in an industry that is used to supplying frozen or defrosted products.” explains Jim. “Unlike most of our competitors, our aim is to supply customers with freshly cooked and chilled products, rather than frozen.”
Unlike the company’s old processing line, which used thermal fluid boilers to supply hot water via heat exchangers, the new system will use steam from the Fulton plant room for the thawing and cooking process, as well as for CIP services and hand washing.
Firstly, for thawing the raw product, water is heated to 40 degrees centigrade using the steam. The cooking process then uses steam injected into circulating water via a fine mesh food-grade filter, to provide a consistent temperature that can be accurately controlled to within 0.3 degrees centigrade.
This accuracy couldn’t be achieved with the original thermal fluid boilers due to the volume of water circulating in the system; and the reaction time of the thermal fluids through the heat exchanger.
Following the completion of the final phase of the expansion programme, the old thermal fluid system will be decommissioned and the two RBC1250 boilers, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, will supply steam for both cooking lines.