Saving Seafood

Why the pandemic is causing seafood prices to fall

May 27, 2020 — Even if Americans are cooking at home like they probably never had before, and even if they are consuming more seafood, increased domestic demand has not been enough to offset lost income earned from restaurants, where 70 percent of seafood across the country is consumed (via Wall Street Journal). To give you an idea of how cheap seafood is these days, South Coast Today says that the price of flounder, which used to be sold to New York restaurants, had come down “quite a bit” while the price of scallops is down by 40 percent in the case of larger shellfish, and 30 percent cheaper for the smaller scallops which we find in warehouse stores like Costco and BJ’s today.

Halibut caught at Pacific fisheries used to cost more than $30 at high-end restaurants in Vancouver, but wholesale prices were down about a dollar in mid-April — and those prices are projected to go down further (via The Conversation). The scenario echoes the one experienced by the lobster industry during the early days of the pandemic when quarantines across China during the Lunar New Year period killed demand for shellfish.

One Philadelphia-based company that supplies seafood to restaurants, hotels, and casinos saw its sales plunge 75 percent in March. The situation was so dire, its owner, Sam D’Angelo told the Wall Street Journal that workers stored what they could in freezers and disposed of what they couldn’t save into landfills. The company lost about $100,000 worth of fresh lobster, clams, and mussels; and it’s a scene that’s been repeated several times over in America’s farms (via CNBC). The seafood distributor has since laid off half of its 400 employees.

Read the full story at Mashed

US sees e-commerce, retail seafood sales spike in April

May 5, 2020 — Sales of seafood in supermarkets, through e-commerce grocery outlets, and via meal kits continued their strong growth in the United States in April.

Online grocery sales surged 37 percent from March to April 2020 to reach USD 5.3 billion (EUR 4.9 billion), a recent Brick Meets Click/Symphony RetailAI Online Grocery Shopping Survey found. There were also record grocery e-commerce sales of USD 4 billion (EUR 3.7 billion) in March, the research firms revealed.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

An $8 Billion Wind Farm Will Test Virginia’s Resolve to Be Green

September 23, 2019 — Dominion Energy Inc.’s customers have been pressing the Virginia utility giant for years to source more clean energy. On Thursday, the company heeded their call — with a $7.8 billion, ratepayer-backed plan to build the largest offshore wind farm in America.

The proposal is unprecedented. Never has a utility pitched an offshore wind project of this size — big enough to power 650,000 homes — and in such a way that would have its customers shouldering the costs. It still needs the approval of state regulators, and the blessing of others including the region’s grid operator. But the Richmond-based company is already promoting the plan as a major means of curbing its global-warming emissions 55% by 2030.

In proposing the wind project, Dominion Vice President Mark Mitchell said, the utility is “giving our customers what they have asked for — more renewable energy.”

Already, though, some of its big ratepayers are choosing to take another route. Customers including Costco Wholesale Corp. and Kroger Co. applied for the right to bypass Dominion and negotiate directly with independent electricity suppliers for renewable energy. On Wednesday, less than 24 hours before Dominion announced is massive wind project, the Virginia State Corporation Commission gave them what they wanted, ruling that the utility must allow them to seek other options.

Read the full story at Bloomberg

Alaskan halibut, caught by a century-old Seattle boat, provides a glimpse of Amazon’s strategy with Whole Foods

April 28, 2019 — From the deck of his 106-year-old halibut schooner, undergoing a seasonal overhaul at Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle, skipper Wade Bassi has better insight than most into what’s happening at Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market, at least as pertains to the product he knows best.

While he doesn’t buy halibut much — he’s got a freezer full of it — Bassi, 43 years a fisherman, keeps an eye on how it’s handled and presented in the grocery stores and fish markets.

“When you look at nice halibut, I mean it is pure white,” he said. “And it is flaky-looking, and it is beautiful. It’s translucent. If you’ve got that in the fish market, people are going to buy it.”

A few days earlier, Whole Foods touted a rarely seen promotional price for halibut as part of its ongoing campaign to revise the grocery chain’s high-cost reputation while maintaining its image for quality and sustainability.

“Whole Foods is one of the better ones, to be honest with you,” Bassi said. “But you know, Whole Foods, whole paycheck. … They usually do charge way more for everything than anywhere else. Which really surprises me that they’re selling this for $16-something a pound, because they’re not making anything on it.”

Whole Foods’ halibut deal opens a window into Amazon’s grocery strategy as it seeks to combine the defining characteristics of each brand, leverage its juggernaut Prime membership program and take a larger share of the grocery business from competitors such as Walmart, Kroger and Costco.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times

Amazon’s grocery stores may push seafood changes

March 4, 2019 — Amazon’s new venture into opening full-scale grocery stores will force a change in the way fresh seafood and other items are sold, analysts say.

On 1 March, The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon is planning to open dozens of grocery stores in several major United States cities, including Los Angeles, California.

The stores would not be the smaller, 1,800-square-foot Amazon Go concept stores that Amazon began testing last year, but rather, they will be 35,000-square-feet mainstream grocery stores. The larger size will allow Amazon to offer more variety of products – and likely lower-priced items – than Whole Foods Market stores, the Journal reported.

Existing grocery chains should be concerned by Amazon’s entrance into the market, analysts said in the article. Stock prices for Walmart, Kroger, Target, BJs, Costco, and others all sank on Friday, 1 March.

“Amazon has become one of the world’s largest retailers by driving cost out of the marketplace. Food retailers the ilk of HEB, Publix, Kroger, and Albertsons will have the most to lose as they continue to fight for dollars from the ‘middle,’” Steven Johnson, grocerant guru at consulting firm Foodservice Solutions, told SeafoodSource.

Meanwhile, value grocery chains such as Lidl, Aldi, and WinCo will likely have more growth as Amazon enters the market, according Johnson.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

The Man Who Got Americans to Eat Trash Fish Is Now a Billionaire

July 19, 2017 — Chuck Bundrant was a college freshman with $80 in his pocket when he drove halfway across the country to Seattle to earn a few bucks fishing. The year was 1961.

He hasn’t stopped fishing since.

And today, Bundrant, the founder and majority owner of Trident Seafoods, is worth at least $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth is due to a fair measure of pluck. Back in the early 1980s, he persuaded Americans to eat pollock, then considered a trash fish, at fast-food restaurants and, to this day, Trident ships it — along with salmon and cod — to chains including Costco and Safeway.

Along the way, Bundrant cultivated politicians who would pass legislation that aided Trident’s business by keeping foreign fisheries at bay. These days, Trident also is benefiting from health-conscious consumers gravitating to seafood.

The Bloomberg index calculates that Bundrant owns 51 percent of privately-held Trident, which had $2.4 billion in revenue last year, based on information compiled from trade groups. It’s valued by the Bloomberg index at about $2.1 billion, using comparisons to five publicly traded peer companies, including Clearwater Seafoods Inc. and Oceana Group Ltd. Trident operates about 16 processing plants and 41 fishing vessels — and remains defiantly independent.

“We don’t answer to investment bankers like some other seafood companies,’’ the company writes on its website. “We only answer to our customers, our fishermen, and our employees.”

Read the full story at Bloomberg

Costco Sued for Selling Slave-Labor Shrimp

August 19, 2015 — A new lawsuit filed against Costco takes the retailer to task for selling shrimp farmed by sea slaves in Thailand. The first of its kind, the class-action suit was filed by California resident Monica Sud, who argues that the Washington-based warehouse club has helped sustain the farmed-prawn industry through its purchasing power and that, furthermore, it hasn’t been honest with consumers about where its shrimp comes from. If true, doing so would violate California law, which requires companies to be honest about illegal conduct in their supply chains.

Several reports over the last year have revealed that horrid conditions and abusive labor practices are rampant in the Thai fishing industry, and that many Americans have very likely unwittingly purchased fish and shrimp produced using slave labor at chains including Costco, Safeway, and Walmart.

Read the full story at Grub Street