Handle and extract meat from fragile, variable-geometry shellfish (lobster, crab, scallop)

Through Clearwater Seafoods — North America's largest shellfish producer, harvesting and processing lobster, snow crab, sea scallops, clams, and coldwater shrimp — Premium Brands runs vertically integrated 'ocean-to-plate' processing facilities. The dexterous tasks include orienting and gripping live or whole shellfish of widely varying size and shape, and extracting intact meat (e.g., lobster tail/claw meat, scallop adductor) without crushing the delicate flesh or embedding shell fragments. Shellfish are rigid-shelled but irregular and slippery on the outside, fragile inside; each piece differs, defeating fixed-geometry grippers. Clearwater already uses a specialized high-pressure system for some lobster-meat extraction, but the grasping, orienting, and meat-handling steps around it remain manual and feel-dependent. These steps are central to a labor-intensive, high-value seafood operation, and a mishandle damages an expensive, irreplaceable premium product. We identified this through our own research; we have not confirmed the specifics with the customer directly. This page is our researched read — a starting point for that conversation.