Aquaculture sector turns to processing equipment supplier Becker Pumps for help

With demand for vacuum-packed seafood products on the rise, business is good right now for Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio-based Becker Pumps Corporation. And thanks to an unlikely customer segment, the future could be even brighter still for the subsidiary of Germany’s Gebr. Becker GmbH.

Becker Pumps Corp., which was founded in 1885 and established stateside in the late 1970s, is a premier supplier of vacuum pumps to the seafood, poultry, meat, and feed industries. The company provides preventative maintenance kits, cyclonic filers, central vacuum systems, dry rotary screws, rotary vanes, regenerative blowers, and other processing pump accessories. It services clients throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

The equipment provider has been working diligently behind the scenes for years to ensure that the processing machinery necessary to vacuum-seal perishable food products has one of its most vital components, the vacuum pump, in proper working order. 

“Everything that you see that’s vacuum-packed, they need a pump to do that,” Darin Ladd, the national sales manager for Becker Pumps Corporation, explained to SeafoodSource. “We’re one small component to that bigger machine, but our pump is critical to the operation. If our pump doesn’t work, that machine doesn’t work. [If] the machine can’t work…that means the company’s not producing what they need to produce, which is getting product out the door.”

The parts provided by Becker are interchangeable, Ladd said, and are compatible with a wide variety of machines hosted at seafood processing sites. Oil-flooded pumps, oil lubricated vacuum pumps, and 100 percent dry, oil-less pumps are the typical fare for seafood processors. However, a new, unexpected market segment could soon be emerging for Becker Pumps in the aquaculture realm.

“We did discover that there’s another main trend going on here [in the seafood industry] that we didn’t expect, which is using these blowers for aquafarming,” he said.

While exhibiting at Seafood Expo North America in Boston, Massachusetts 11 to 13 March, representatives from Becker Pumps were pleasantly surprised by the number of seafood farmers, particularly within the shellfish sector, who inquired about the company’s regenerative blowers, hoping to use the equipment to oxygenize their operations' water supply. Fleshing out this developing customer base within the aquaculture industry is of considerable interest to Becker moving forward, the company said.