Freshness is a matter of distance.

The factory is on the quay

Marukaichi Suisan stands directly alongside the No.2 wharf of the Port of Monbetsu. Inside the grounds we operate several large plants, each built around a product: a live crab plant, a boiling plant, a scallop plant, a tank plant, a freezing plant. Seafood landed from the Sea of Okhotsk enters our own facility while it is still fresh, and processing and freezing are handled in-house from start to finish — no intermediate warehouse, no overnight haul.

The world's first raw auto-shucker

Drop a whole scallop into the Auto Shucker NHS-5000 and it separates shell, mantle and gut automatically, recovering the adductor muscle raw. It was the first machine in the world to do this. We installed our first unit in 2018 and added two more in 2021.

Hand-shucking is safe and reliable, and we still do it where it matters. But automating the bulk of the work removed cost from the product without removing care from it — which is how we deliver faster, and at a price that makes sense for a wholesale buyer.

Inside the Monbetsu plant — the scallop line in operation.

Salmon roe, checked grain by grain

Ikura is the taste of autumn in Hokkaido. We take the roe sacs from salmon landed only hours earlier and wash the roe one grain at a time. To keep the burst — that pop the product is bought for — every batch is then sorted entirely by hand as it moves along the belt.

A machine would be faster. It would also break grains. So the line stays as it is.

Live crab, held alive

Crab arrives alive and stays alive. Twenty seawater tanks hold it until the moment of processing, with the water kept clean by ozone sterilisation, UV seawater sterilisation and ozonated-air systems. Crab is boiled in a dedicated plant and rapid-frozen straight after.

Freezing, four ways

Different products want different cold. We run brine (salt immersion) freezing, a steam-belt tunnel freezer, large-capacity rapid freezers and frozen storage — all of it a short walk from the receiving door. A sanitising thawing chamber handles material that needs it, under the same hygiene controls as the rest of the line.