Cold Storage Refrigeration for a Moroccan agro-industrial SME.

FOOD MASTERS is a Moroccan SME located in Casablanca region, specialized in the importation of seafood products. It supplies the largest Moroccan largest seafood distributors and restaurants throughout the country with seafood products. The company is currently renting cold rooms with low coefficient of performance (COP) that represents a considerable burden leads to increased costs.

To reduce the rental costs of cold room for the storage of seafood products, the company invested to build its own cold room with a high-performance cold unit. The new cold room refrigeration unit use the best available technology on the market and integrate a semi-hermetic screw compressor from Bitzer, a leader of refrigeration and air conditioning technology. The semi-hermetic screw compressor has a high coefficient of performance (COP) of 2.05 for a temperature of -18°C, compared to other conventional compressors available on the market, with a COP of 1.7. The new cold unit improved the energy efficiency of the cold room through a good speed control at minimum energy requirements and an optimum performance and high reliability.

This new investment benefited from the technical assistance and financing provided by Green Value Chain enabled the company to supply high-quality products by storing fresh fish at an appropriate temperature (-18°C) and thus allowed the company to save 433.54 MWh/year of electricity corresponding to 24% compared to conventional equipment available on the market as well as GHG savings of 247.99 TCO2/year.

Green Value Chain (GVC) in Morocco is a credit facility of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to provide funding to local partner financial institutions for on-lending to Moroccan SMEs belonging to agribusiness, processing industries and logistics value chains and ecosystems. Supported by the European Union, the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Korean Technical Assistance and Cooperation Account (KTACA) and the EBRD Shareholder Special Fund (EBRD SSF), the facility aims to improve competitiveness of SMEs and that of their value chains and ecosystems through highly efficient green investments.