Why Fish Should Be Fully Surrounded by Ice Instead of Sitting on Top
Walk through almost any receiving dock and you will see the same thing: totes filled with crushed ice, fish laid across the surface, maybe a scoop or two thrown over the top for good measure. It looks cold. It looks correct. The ice is there, the fish is there, and the box is heavy enough that nobody questions it. But a fish sitting on top of ice is not the same as a fish being cooled by ice. That distinction is easy to miss because both situations look nearly identical from the outside. The difference only shows up later — in a soft belly wall, a dull eye, an off-odour at the plant, a rejected lot at the border. And by then, nobody connects it back to how the fish was packed on day one. Ice Doesn't Cool Fish. Contact Does. Ice removes heat in one way that matters here: it absorbs energy as it melts, and it can only do that where it physically touches something warmer. That capacity is genuinely enormous. It's why ice works at all. But it's useless if the ice isn't tou...