How I Made Floating Fish Feed

One morning while coming to office, I got out of the lift and was walking towards our main entrance when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It could Only be the chairman of the Company, coming out of the other lift. He did that when he wanted something urgently, and would give all the help needed. This time he asked me to come to his office.

There he told me that there was a great demand for a bigger fish, farmed in the coastal Andhra and Tamil Nadu.They were active type and jumped out and ate floating things. We wanted to make floating fish feed suitable for them. They had received quotations from UK for equipment to produce them for 20 crores and more. This was just not feasible. Can you do something about this?

My Company had a sense of humour, giving a vegetarian chap like me charge of animal feeds among other things. We took the feeds from about 50,000 tons per annum to around 3 lakh tons. I invented cow feed with 45% molasses, which made the cows love that, chicken feed, Hyderabad had just started coming into news, feed for shrimps which has to lie at the bottom of the pond for a long time without dissolving etc

Now it was floating fish feed.

I looked around, talked to experts, but they knew about feed but not much about the equipment. That night I was cooking nutri nuggets, something that had come recently in the market, I had bought a packet out of curiosity. I put it in pressure cooker with some vegetables and went for my bath etc. When I opened the cooker, it was floating on the surface. I took one nugget out and checked. It was soft and It was still a nugget. I thought it will break up if I kept it under pressure for more time. After several attempts it remained the same. Then I had my dinner. The nutri nugget was chewy and tasty. I looked at the packet to see the ingredients. It was mostly protein. At around 2 am the thought came to me , is this what we are looking for?

In the morning, I went to my nutrition and fish feed expert. He checked the ingredients he said the floating fish feed will also be high protein like this one. I went to see the chairman and asked him about the makers of this product. He said I know the chaps and will talk to him, and after talking to them that he asked me to visit the factory. I took a car and went and saw the process of high pressure extrusion, how it pops out at a high temperature. The factory head told me that their capacity is under ulilized and carry out our trial any time.

I consulted our feed specialist and got the our factory to mix a bag of the required ingredients. Next morning I took the bag to the factory and got our nuggets made. We just fed the mix in the high pressure screw extractor and watched the floating fish feed popping out . We tested it in water. It did not melt, it always floated.

Next morning I kept a sample packet of fish feed on the chairman's table.

It was a stunning cost saving job, but it looked so simple, very few appreciated me.