Aquarium Products

San Francisco Bay Brand Frozen Food

What is the main ingredient of our Formulated Tropical Fish Foods? - All San Francisco Bay Brand formula fish foods start with nature's most important ingredient - brine shrimp - which make up at least 30% of all formulated fish foods.

San Francisco Bay Brand's brine shrimp are harvested from FDA certified solar evaporation ponds used to make salt. Compared to other sources of commercially available brine shrimp, the brine shrimp harvested from the ponds around the San Francisco Bay show a superior protein and fat nutritional profile (measured by dry weight). Due to the relatively deep ponds we harvest the shrimp from, 30 years of experience in harvesting brine shrimp and our proprietary brine shrimp cleaning steps, we succeed in keeping both the crude fiber and the ash content in our brine shrimp very low.

Feeding Guide: Please click on the type of fish to see a list of the San Francisco Bay Brand Foods recommended:

What Do We Add To Our Formulated Tropical Fish Foods? - We only use fresh, delivered by the wholesaler, vegetables in our formulated fish foods. Washing, cutting, grinding to correct size, and mixing are done as fast as possible to minimize leeching of nutrients. Notwithstanding the use of fresh vegetables, we add a vitamin premix (custom made for San Francisco Bay Brand and specifically made for use in aquaculture feeds) to each of the formulated fish foods. This ensures your fish will be supplied with the complete range of required vitamins. All of our formulated fish foods are fortified with stabilized vitamin C. And lastly, live brine shrimp harvested the night before, are mixed with the rest of the ingredients. This minimizes damage to the live brine shrimp and subsequent leeching of body fluids.

How Do We Bind Our Formulated Tropical Fish Foods? - All of our formulated fish foods use algin (or sodium alginate) as a binder. Algin is a carbohydrate derived from the giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) harvested from the coasts of California. Algin is a natural product found in all members of the brown seaweeds (Phaeophyceae) where it forms a structural component of the cell walls. The main advantage of using algin compared to using gelatine as a binder, is that sodium alginate is soluble in water at room temperature whilst gelatine needs to be heated in order to transform it into a gel when mixing it with water. Heating of fish foods might endanger nutritional quality due to protein degradation and vitamin loss.

How Do We Freeze Our Formulated Tropical Fish Foods? - Perhaps of most importance is the way we freeze our formulated fish foods. At San Francisco Bay Brand we use liquid carbon dioxide to freeze our formulated fish foods and our brine shrimp. Using liquid CO2 severely lowers the temperature at which freezing takes place compared to traditional freezing methods - we freeze at -85F (-65C)! Freezing at such low temperatures improves product quality by the formation of a bigger amount of smaller sized ice crystals. Smaller ice crystals do not puncture the cell membranes as larger ice crystals do, so leeching of nutrients upon thawing is minimized.

10 Reasons to Use San Francisco Bay Brand Foods:

1. Best brine shrimp available.

2. Nutritionally complete.

3. Liquid carbon dioxide freezing process ensures freshness.

4. Allows fish to feed at their natural feeding levels.

5. High level of quality control exceeds industry standards.

6. Algin used as a binder.

7. Less water added than other brands.

8. Convenient, easy to use packaging.

9. Individually packaged to prevent freezer burn and to lock in freshness.

10. State of the art bio-enriching techniques.