The situation
A shrimp processor was losing weight between brining and the finished frozen pack, and the attempts to correct it had produced a product the customer described as rubbery and the panel described as bouncy.
Why it is hard
Shrimp muscle is not fish muscle and neither is meat. The protein composition is different, the tissue is more delicate, and it holds water for less time. A brine designed for poultry or for whitefish applied to shrimp will take up water that does not stay.
The window between losing yield and gaining a bouncy texture is narrower here than in almost any other muscle product.
The rubbery result is the other failure mode. Push water binding too hard in a delicate tissue and the structure that holds the water becomes the structure you bite through. Freezing then compounds both problems, because ice crystals rupture the tissue and release water that the damaged structure cannot take back on thawing.
What was done
The brine was specified for the tissue rather than adapted from another one. Uptake and retention were treated as two separate measurements, since a high uptake that does not survive freezing is not yield. The freezing rate was examined as part of the formulation question rather than as a separate operation, because crystal size decides how much of the gained water is still present at the end. The declaration was checked against the destination market before a yield level was agreed.
What it shows
That the number the plant celebrates is often not the number the customer receives.
