RAS Aquaculture Pte Ltd

Established in 2016, RAS Aquaculture is the first start-up experience for the founding team who are a group of college school mates with a strong passion for entrepreneurship.

The company was initially envisioned as a simple vertical crab fattening and holding facility using off-the-shelf RAS systems to target a growing B2C market for live and meaty crabs. Over the past 4 years, the team has continuously innovated, designing bespoke RAS systems incorporating BIOFLOC, crab fattening techniques and establishing B2C distribution channels for the live product.

We are proud to have enjoyed some commercial success – throughput crab volume is approximately 9.6 tons per annum. A consultancy and advisory arm was also established to provide services (systems design, aquaculture processes) and share knowledge with the growing community.

Recognizing overlaps in technology, the team has decided to expand into indoor shrimp aquaculture via similar RAS + BIOFLOC methods in early 2019. It is also in part a response to Singapore’s goal of producing 30% of food by 2030 – aquaculture has a substantial role to play.  Current facility in Malaysia is able to produce >1T/annum, with plans to expand to 5T/annum with an additional facility.

Current employees: 8

Revenue per fiscal year: 275k SGD

MUD CRAB FATTENING and Trading Facility – Serves over 40 restaurants with high quality mud crabs.

SHRIMP FARMING- Operates a fully indoor shrimp farming facility, with zero water exchange technology. Serves over 3 restaurants and products retailed with key distributing partners.

Consulting-Serves over 1000 international clients in setting up a shrimp or mud crab farming business.

Consumables and Hardware- Specialized probiotics/prebiotics/enzyme for shrimp farmers. Filtration solution for biofloc shrimp farmers.

Mangrove crab is the basic ingredient of one of Singapore’s most iconic dishes: the Chili Crab. In recent years, the supply of adult mangrove crabs has been adversely affected, both in terms of price and in quality. Soaring prices and the lack of good-quality crabs is causing supply to fall behind demand. It is important to be able to distinguish meaty crabs from lean crabs as the meat yield of individual crabs can vary from filled high-quality crabs to empty water-filled crabs. Only a portion of the catches, depending on season and geographical area, are of good quality. Crabs with high meat content have a higher value and can be sold live or cooked whole at restaurants. Medium quality crabs are generally limited to being used as raw material by the processing industry. A correct quality sorting of live crabs is essential to optimize this logistics. The current methods adopted by the industry to assess crabs such as “pressing carapace”, “looking at shell color”, “checking if claws are worn out” and “looking at moon phase to plan harvest time” are inadequate as they are very empirical. These methods often lead to errors in ascertaining whether a crab is suitable for the restaurant.

Together with Nanyang Polytechnic, we have developed a rapid, accurate, and non-invasive NIRS approach using MicroNIR for grading mangrove crabs. This method was developed by referencing NIRS spectra to a hemolymph refractive index that is an excellent proxy marker for crab meat quality. A practical, portable, simple, rapid, and non-invasive technique to analyze crustacean nutritional condition has huge potential to assist with the management of wild stocks, improve post-harvest survival and quality control, and manage brood stock as the aquaculture industry continues to expand to meet growing consumer demand.

RAS AQUACULTURE PTE LTD facilities across Singapore and Malaysia can be a test-bed for the propose product and also facilitate the roll out of the technology through the industry.

Automation

The microNIR device can be implemented on a larger scale by utilizing automation technology to reduce the experienced manpower needed for grading and sorting.

AI/DATA Science/Machine Learning

To continuously improve the accuracy of the model, AI/MACHINE learning can be employed to improve the model. The platform could be expanded to other seafood products for analyzing the quality, freshness, species-verification.