April 10, 2020 — Dive Brief:
- As statewide mandates force many restaurants and foodservice operations to temporarily shut down, the seafood industry is severely hurting. Fishermen and dealers are working on looking for new markets to sell in and have asked the federal government for assistance.
- Bert Jongerden, general manager of a Maine auction house Portland Fish Exchange, told the Associated Press that the market for higher-end products like scallops and lobster is “pretty much nonexistent.” The Exchange typically moves up to 60,000 pounds of fish per week but has plummeted to less than a third of that.
- To get more consumers to eat seafood, a new group of 19 organizations called the The Seafood4Health Action Coalition launched a consumer-facing campaign called “Eat Seafood, America!” this week to push consumers to stay healthy by eating more seafood and therefore boosting the U.S. seafood economy, according to an email sent to Food Dive.
Dive Insight:
Despite the rise in shoppers stockpiling food across the U.S., the seafood industry is in turmoil. Distribution, processing and fishing has slowed as prices are dropping and customers are dwindling. With restaurants closed, where seafood usually retains high prices, many of the country’s fisheries have reported sales dropping as much as 95% and thousands of commercial fishers are at risk of bankruptcy, The Washington Post reported.
About 68% of the $102.2 billion that consumers paid for U.S. fishery products in 2017 was spent in foodservice. The lack in demand has sent prices free falling for a variety of products and has even caused some to stop fishing until the outbreak subsides. In March, the wholesale price for 1.25-pound lobsters was 33% lower than it was in 2018, according to Urner Barry data cited by the Associated Press.