Focusun China

12 - 1 - 2026

In seafood processing, deep-sea fishing, and cold chain logistics, achieving immediate, deep, uniform, and damage-free rapid cooling of catches is crucial for their freshness, taste, and commercial value. Traditional crushed ice or flake ice cooling, while effective, suffers from uneven cooling, potential damage to fish skin, and insufficient contact with the product, especially when handling high-quality or fragile seafood such as tuna, shrimp, and shellfish. Slurry ice machines, as an innovative "liquid ice" preparation technology, offer a revolutionary preservation solution for the seafood industry due to their unique physical form and cooling characteristics.

What Is A Slurry Ice Machine? How Does It Work?

Think of slurry ice machine as industrial equipment that produces something you might not expect: ice that flows like a liquid. Using advanced dynamic ice-making technology, these systems create an ice slurry at temperatures below 0°C that acts almost like a super-chilled smoothie for your seafood.

Here's what makes it special—the ice slurry features efficient heat transfer properties and won't clog your pumps or pipelines. It cools products quickly and uniformly without damaging surfaces. That makes it ideal across the board: seafood processing facilities, fishing vessels, supermarket displays, and cold chain logistics operations.
The core technology driving industries slurry ice machine is called dynamic subcooled water crystallization. Sounds complex, but here's the practical breakdown. Inside a specialized evaporator, the refrigeration system rapidly drops the temperature of water or brine solution below its normal freezing point—but here's the trick—it keeps that water in liquid form. We call this a subcooled state. When you draw out that supercooled water and give it just a slight disturbance, it instantly triggers massive ice crystal formation throughout the liquid. What you get is a highly fluid ice-water mixture—ice slurry—at temperatures ranging from -1°C down to -3°C depending on concentration. That's notably colder than regular ice made from pure water.

Components of A Slurry Ice Machine

Refrigeration and Evaporation Core

At the heart sits a high-efficiency heat exchanger—typically either a scraper or tubular evaporator design—where refrigerant pulls heat out of the flowing brine or water solution, bringing it down to that critical subcooled state. Smart engineering in the system design prevents clogs and ensures you get continuous, stable ice crystal formation without interruptions.

Ice Slurry Generation and Regulation System

This is where precision matters. The system carefully controls when and how the subcooled solution gets released and agitated to create the slurry instantly. Through intelligent controls, operators can flexibly dial in the ice-to-water ratio anywhere from roughly 10% up to over 50% concentration. Why does that matter? Different seafood varieties and various cooling stages require different approaches—having that adjustability gives you optimization options.

Conveying and Storage System

The generated ice slurry has excellent fluidity and can be easily transported to processing tanks, fishing boat holds, or insulated storage tanks via conventional water pumps and pipelines, achieving a closed and hygienic transportation process throughout.

Slurry Ice Machine VS Traditional Ice Making Methods: Why is it More Suitable for Seafood Processing?

The advantages of slurry ice machine come directly from the unique physical properties of ice slurry itself, creating a cascade of efficiency improvements.

1. Cooling Speed That Actually Matches Industry Needs

Traditional ice blocks depend mainly on cold air convection and whatever limited surface contact they achieve for heat transfer. The result? Slow, uneven cooling that leaves you crossing your fingers about quality.

Slurry ice flips that entirely. You're working with a fluid containing literally billions of tiny ice crystals. These can seamlessly surround and adhere to every surface contour of your seafood products, creating enormous effective contact area. Think of it as liquid encapsulation—the heat transfer efficiency is extraordinary. We're seeing cooling rates 3 to 5 times faster than conventional methods. That rapid penetration means the fish core temperature drops quickly to the ideal preservation range, dramatically slowing bacterial growth and enzyme activity that degrade quality. Time becomes your friend instead of your enemy.

2. Gentle Treatment That Protects Premium Product

Here's a problem nobody talks about enough with regular ice: those sharp edges. When solid ice blocks shift around during handling and mixing, they scratch delicate fish skin and damage shrimp shells. For premium products where appearance matters tremendously, that's money literally getting scraped away.

Slurry ice behaves completely differently. The texture is soft, with zero sharp edges. It flows around products like a protective fluid of ice. During the entire cooling and transport process, you get virtually no physical damage to product surfaces. That perfect preservation of appearance and cellular structure? For high-end applications like sashimi-grade ingredients, it's absolutely critical.

3. Operational Advantages That Transform Your Workflow

Because slurry ice moves through pipelines, you enable fully enclosed automated transport from production straight to application point. Manual handling drops dramatically, human contact with product decreases, and your hygiene standards jump significantly.

Every component of industries slurry ice machine that touches the ice slurry gets built from food-grade SUS304 stainless steel, meeting HACCP and FDA standards without compromise. Real-time adjustability lets operators dial in the perfect ice slurry concentration and temperature for whatever you're processing—fish, shrimp, shellfish, whatever—achieving the optimal balance between preservation quality and energy consumption. For fishing vessel applications specifically, the compact design and efficient cooling capacity deliver uninterrupted chilling protection from the moment seafood hits the deck until you reach port, even within the constrained space of a boat cabin.

Common Questions About Slurry Ice Machine

Q1. What production capacities are available?

Focusun manufactures slurry ice machine across a wide capacity range—from 3 tons daily up to 80 tons daily. There's a solution whether you're running a boutique operation or large-scale industrial facility.

Q2. How safe and hygienic are these slurry ice systems really?

The enclosed pipeline transport system significantly cuts manual handling and human contact, elevating hygiene standards substantially. All contact surfaces use food-grade SUS304 stainless steel that complies fully with HACCP and FDA requirements. You're meeting the strictest food safety standards without cutting corners.

Q3. Can slurry ice machine be customized for specific operations?

Absolutely. As a world-class ice manufacturer, Focusun brings advanced ice-making technology backed by professional technicians who can engineer the most suitable slurry ice machine for your exact requirements and constraints.

Conclusion: Choose a Safe and Rapid Seafood Ice-making Solution – Focusun Slurry Ice Machine

For seafood operations, slurry ice machine delivers way more than just a new type of ice. You're getting a precisely controllable "intelligent preservation fluid" plus a complete deep cooling process solution. This technology transforms cooling from something crude and passive into something refined, proactive, and seamlessly integrated into modern processing workflows. Previous cooling approaches basically amounted to "pack it in ice and hope for the best." Slurry ice technology means controlling the preservation process with precision, delivering ocean freshness to consumers through the most efficient, gentle, and reliable method available.

Investing in an industrial-grade system from a professional slurry ice machine manufacturer like Focusun establishes a decisive advantage in controlling the quality of seafood products at the source. It directly increases product yield, extends shelf life, and ensures superior taste and color, thereby building strong brand reputation and competitiveness in the high-end market.

Contact us about your requests if you’re interested. Our ice makers will always have a way to satisfy all your needs.