Wickramaratne Sisilco: Sri Lanka’s biggest blast freezing facility is upbeat

By David Ebert

Have you ever wondered about how it is that with most of the fish and meat you eat being seasonal, you still manage to get a steady supply of it whenever you need? Take fish for example. It spoils very easily and the local fishermen who bring in the catch can’t afford to risk holding on to it, and sell it as soon as they can to the large scale fish dealers who ultimately send it all over the island to market.

However, fish is seasonal and in order to keep prices down and stocks steady, the fish needs to be stored and supply managed in order to maintain the balance. Wickramanatne Sisilco Ltd., possibly the country’s largest blast freezing facility for perishable food items, caters to this vital need.

General Manager Desmond Diaz on a tour of the facility explained the whole process of dealing with raw meat and fish, starting off at the loading area which is where the freezer trucks that bring in the various goods for storage deposit their loads,

“This is where the fresh products come in and get unloaded and for fresh products like meat, before it can be put into our large freezers, it needs to be blast frozen because it is raw. So we can put in about five to six tons of meat and fish in each freezer, where in about four to five hours we then bring the temperature down to minus 40 degrees which is the temperature for blast freezing.

“Then in another four to five hours, the temperature of the product is brought down to minus 18 degrees which is when we transfer them to the freezers. In total, we can handle about 4,500 metric tons with our seven freezers.”

Built with a complex ventilation system that circulates the air around the room, it is considered dangerous for a human being to stay unprotected inside one for a prolonged period at a temperature of minus 40 degrees. Special insulated gear is essential for workers loading product into the rooms even at much higher temperatures and special safety measures such as emergency unlocking buttons are placed in each room in case of such an eventuality.

A surprising fact about the semi-automated facility was that it requires only 12 workers to run, and even then, only for the unloading and stacking by forklift and the washing.

With this being the country’s biggest blast freezing facility currently and barely a year old, suppliers previously had to turn to smaller scale blast freezing facilities which couldn’t handle large loads due to their limited capacities. The facility has the capacity to cater to the export sector as well and Diaz expects a high demand for its services and pointed out that the company has already commenced an expansion plan on the adjoining premises to increase its already massive capacity.  The Wickramaratne Group had its beginnings in 1965 at Gas Works Street in Colombo with its founder David Wickramaratne providing food supplies to the armed forces by sourcing produce directly from local farmers, storing them in rented warehouses and cold rooms and transporting the deliveries himself to the various military camps.  This has since been a feature of the group’s business model of helping farmers get a better price for his produce minus the middleman. Since then, the group has grown in stature into a conglomerate, now boasting six subsidiary companies spanning construction and agriculture. The group has evolved into a truly local family concern with a strong commitment towards it suppliers ad partners i.e., the Sri Lankan Government, multinational corporations and a countless number of small and medium scale enterprises.

Wickramaratne Group Chairman Chandana Wickramaratne, speaking about the facility, said: “We saw a huge potential for growth in the cold storage and blast freezing sector. With the country focusing on the increasing exports, we realised that it is essential that we have the right infrastructure in place to cater to both the local demand as well as for the storage of local export produce as well. We are confident that our state-of-the-art facility has both the capacity and the right focus to cater to any requirement.”

Pix by Upul Abayasekara