What to do with all the shrimp heads?

While eating a whole shrimp is common in most countries. In the US and Canada, consumers prefer to eat a cleaned de-headed shrimp.

Many chefs actually prefer using the whole shrimp, because..that is where the flavor is. Just like making chicken soup, you want to use the chicken bones to make a rich flavorful broth, the dame goes for shrimp stocks. At Sun Shrimp we have been selling our shrimp primarily to high end restaurants, and nearly all of them prefer to purchase the head-on shrimp.

But with the pandemic shutting down many of our restaurant customers, we started focusing directly to the consumer at home. This meant that we had to take the whole shrimp and de-head them after which we have to peel and de-vein them.

This created a huge supply of heads and shells representing nearly 50% of the harvested shrimp. So what to do with all the heads?

Located on Pine Island, we are surrounded by some of the richest crabbing grounds in the United States. We have crab trappers setting traps for all kinds of crabs, with the Florida Stone crab being one of the most famous and desirable crab around.

When the crab traps are set, they usually use fish parts for bait, but once they started using Sun Shrimp heads in the traps, crabbers started seeing many more crabs in their traps. Now all of a sudden we have a huge demand for our shrimp heads. We actually have a waiting list. It is good to know that our Sun Shrimp can be used effectively by our local fisherman. What is really amazing, is that for many years, the crabbers had tried shrimp heads from other sources with mixed results at best. Apparently nothing works as well as Sun Shrimp heads.

Sun Shrimp are not only the most delicious shrimp for humans, other creatures prefer them as well!