Saving Seafood

While global tilapia production increases, US imports fall

February 4, 2019 — Tilapia production globally has steadily increased over the past decade – with 2018 production estimated at nearly 6.3 million metric tons (MT) – yet U.S. imports were forecast to likely be at their lowest level in several years.

The data, shared at the Value Finfish panel during the 2019 Global Seafood Market Conference in Coronado, California earlier this month, estimates that the U.S. imported around 300,000 MT of tilapia in 2018. That’s significantly lower than the 500,000 MT high in 2012.

“Through October, through 2014, things have been on a pretty steady decline,” Todd Clark of Endeavor Seafood said.

The declines are clear in U.S. broadline sales, with virtually every commercial category having a steady three-year decline in sales. Commercial medium chains, representing chains with between 100 and 249 units, fell the most with a 46 percent drop in sales. Non-commercial restaurants, which make up the largest share of tilapia purchasing at over 14 million pounds, dropped six percent.

“Each one of those categories has been on a steady decline,” Clark said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Experts question value of “premium” seafood

January 30, 2019 — At the beginning of the panel on premium finfish at the 2019 Global Seafood Market Conference in Coronado, California, on 15 January, moderator Derek Figueroa, the chief operating officer of Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.-based Seattle Fish Company, flashed a slide with the definition of both “premium” and “premium seafood.”

  • Premium: Noun – a high-value or a value in excess of that normally or usually expected. Adjective – of exceptional quality or amount.
  • Premium seafood: Species or product form whose attributes drive product preference over and above the norm.

Figueroa clarified that the second definition had been created by the seven panelists themselves, and then, amidst updates on the status of species such as mahi, tilapia, sea bass, and barramundi, he curated a discussion on how the panelists arrived at their opinions on how they define “premium” seafood.

“What can we do to position seafood as a premium product?” Figueroa asked the panel. And, more provocatively, he added, “And do we want to?”

James Berger, the director of national sales for Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.A.-based Beaver Street Fisheries, seemed to struggle to answer Figueroa’s question.

“Is premium defined by price? Is it determined by the fact that you can’t find it – that it’s rare? Or is it defined by some stigma due to its cool Hawaiian name or that it comes from South America? I don’t know the answer,” he said.

Figueroa identified seven characteristics that can help define a species as premium: branding, price, sustainability, harvest method, country of origin, story/provenance, and whether it’s local or regional. He also pointed out the fact that harvesters, suppliers, retailers, and consumers each have their own distinct ideas of what defines a species of fish as premium. For harvesters, it could be demand, seasonality, and the labor involved. For suppliers, it could be harvest methods and availability. For restaurants or retailers, price, flavor, versatility, and sustainability play a role. For consumers, price and whether a fish is wild or farmed appear to be the main factors.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Importance of Russian king crab grows as Alaska supplies tighten

January 25, 2019 — Quotas of Russian-landed red king crab from the Far East and Barents Sea fisheries are growing even as Alaskan landings shrink due to concerns about the health of the stock.

However, members of the Global Seafood Market Conference’s Shellfish Panel said last week that US supplies of red king crab are dropping due to the lower Alaska quotas and reduced Russian imports as more crab is sent live to China and South Korea.

The US supply situation could get worse before it gets better, John Sackton of Seafood Datasearch told the audience.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game set the Bristol Bay King Crab quota at 4.3 million pounds for the 2018/19 season, which compares to 6.6m lbs in 2017/18. This year’s effective spawning biomass was 33.3m lbs, greater than the 14.5m lbs needed to open the fishery. But there is concern that the biomass could shrink further in future years, Sackton said.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Maine lobster harvest topped 100m lbs again

January 23, 2019 — The Maine Department of Marine Resources is still auditing its 2018 lobster catch and won’t issue a report until February, but department spokesperson Jeff Nichols has reportedly confirmed that the US state landed more than 100 million lbs for the eighth year in a row.

Speaking at the National Fisheries Institute’s Global Seafood Market Conference, in San Diego, California, last week, Keith Moores, president of Gloucester, Massachusetts-based frozen seafood supplier J.W. Bryce, estimated that Maine’s 4,500 harvesters landed about 119m lbs of lobster in 2018, an 8m lb increase over 2017, the Portland (Maine) Press Herald reported.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Survey on US seafood consumption contains surprises

January 23, 2019 — While almost half of all Americans eat little to no seafood, many Americans love the stuff – and are willing to spend more time shopping for it and more money to buy it so they can eat it regularly.

The Food Marketing Institute’s first-ever Power of Seafood survey of more than 2,000 U.S. shoppers found numerous reasons as to why more Americans aren’t buying seafood, and discovered hurdles preventing even the most ardent fans of seafood from buying more.

FMI Vice President of Fresh Foods Rick Stein presented the initial results of the survey at the 2019 Global Seafood Market Conference in Coronado, California, U.S.A. on 17 January.  FMI surveyed 2,096 grocery shoppers representative of the general U.S. population in regard to geography, age, and gender. FMI also incorporated data from sources including IRI, Nielson, Technomics, and Datassentials into its results. The full results of the survey will be released at the 2019 Seafood Expo North America in Boston, Massachusetts, in March.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Restaurant trends emphasize fast casual, but seafood playing catch-up

January 22, 2019 — Trends indicate that Americans are spending more and more of their money on eating out, and an increasing proportion of the ever-larger restaurant spend is being done at fast-casual establishments.

Starting in 2010, Americans’ total spending on food away-from-home started to pull away from spending on food prepared and eaten at home, to the point that Americans spent USD 100 billion (EUR 88 billion) more on eating out in 2017 than on food at home.

“Food away from home started taking up [more of peoples’] food budgets,” Richard Barry, program manager for the National Fisheries Institute, at last week’s Global Seafood Market Conference in Coronado, California.

Among that dining-out experience, one restaurant segment saw the most explosive growth: Chain quick-service restaurants, also known as “fast casual” restaurants. Even during the 2007 to 2009 recession, the segment added thousands of new locations, and in 2015 the segment had more than 200,000 restaurants across the country, up from just over 150,000 in 2005.

“The big driver behind the foodservice segment is these chain quick-service restaurants,” Barry said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Shrimp enters SIMP with “informed compliance” period

January 21, 2019 — As shrimp’s inclusion into a federal government program to monitor seafood imports begins its fourth week, companies affected by the program say it’s been business as usual for them.

On 31 December, NOAA Fisheries along with Customs and Border Protection officials started an informed compliance period for shrimp importers participating in the Seafood Import Monitoring Program. SIMP requires importers keep chain of custody data for products entering the United States. It also requires the shipments to come with harvest and landing data to ensure the products are properly labeled.

According to the NOAA Fisheries website, imported shrimp entries will be inspected and audited, but they will not be rejected through 1 March if the mandatory data is missing. The website adds that the “informed compliance” period allows shrimp processors and importers time to work through any accidental errors in their recordkeeping.

After 1 March, any entries without the required data will be rejected.

The 31 December start date was announced in a Federal Register publication last April. While there is a limited shutdown of the federal government currently, R.L. Visconti, an import broker, told SeafoodSource imports still need to comply with the guidelines.

Jeff Stern, vice president of purchasing for Censea, a major U.S. shrimp importer, said at the Global Seafood Market Conference on 16 January that all of his company’s shrimp entries are being processed as normal.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

‘Three-fold competition’ arises for tighter cod supplies as tariffs could invert haddock price gap

January 18, 2019 — According to figures released at the National Fisheries Institute’s Global Seafood Market Conference, world cod supply is expected to decline to 1.5 million metric tons in 2019, down from 1.59 million metric tons in 2018.

Todd Clark, a founder and partner at Endeavor Seafood, an importer and marketer of frozen seafood based in Newport, Rhode Island, said that there’s a downward supply trend in both Atlantic cod, driven by reductions out of the Barents Sea, and Pacific cod, where US supply has fallen somewhat in the Bering Sea and sharply in the Gulf of Alaska.

“There’s a steady decrease in both of these resources, really,” Clark said.

Looking at Atlantic cod supply in historical perspective, the resource, at 1.3 million metric tons in 2017, has fluctuated between a low of under 1 million metric tons in 2007 and a 2.75 million metric ton high seen in 1974.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

US, China are drivers of push for more salmon production

January 18, 2019 — Demand for salmon continues to be strong globally, but the dual markets of the United States and China have salmon sellers licking their lips at the massive opportunity they represent.

Salmon’s position as a healthy staple is driving interest in the species worldwide, but the low rates of per capita consumption in the U.S. and China show that there’s still plenty of room to grow the markets in both countries, a panel of salmon experts speaking on Wednesday, 16 January at the Global Seafood Market Conference in Coronado, California, U.S.A., agreed.

Natural limits in production from wild-catch salmon fisheries, and more complicated set of restrictions on farmed salmon production, means much of that demand likely won’t be met anytime soon. As a result, prices for salmon are rising. The average price of a pound of salmon in September 2015 was USD 4.12 (EUR 3.62) in 2015 and three years later, in September 2018, the price had risen to USD 5.80. (EUR 5.09).

“That’s the outcome of that gap between supply and demand,” Andy Wink, the executive director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, said.

Wink is especially bullish on the potential for the United States to become a bigger consumer of salmon, even though it already represents the largest salmon market in the world.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Global shrimp supply will remain high for foreseeable future

January 18, 2019 — The glut in the global supply of shrimp that persisted throughout 2018 will remain in 2019, as cold storage facilities in the United States continue to have supplies lasting months in storage.

A panel of experts at the Global Seafood Market Conference in Coronado, California on 17 January said cold storage facilities in the U.S. had, at times, 30 percent more shrimp in storage in 2018 than they did in 2017.

In addition, the panel predicted that the reserves will not be drawn down significantly in 2019. The primary reason for that is production of shrimp in India, which panelists said will remain close to its record high of 740,000 metric tons (MT), with production in other countries starting to increase as well.

“It all comes back to, ‘What are we going to do with all this shrimp?’” said Jeff Goldberg, president of Fortune Imports.

Estimates indicate that there’s 290 million pounds of shrimp currently in cold storage facilities in the U.S., representing a supply that, with no further production or imports, could last more than three months.

That high amount of supply in storage is coupled with increasing supply coming from countries like Ecuador. Between 2013 and 2018, production of shrimp in Ecuador more than doubled, going from 219,412 MT to 471,026 MT.

Ecuador and India aren’t the only countries with increasing supply. Indonesia, Vietnam, and Mexico also saw growth. The most dramatic growth occurred in Guatemala, which has consistently increased between 30 to 40 percent year-over-year.

Read the full story at Seafood Source