January 15, 2018 — State seafood marketers are rebranding fish parts as “specialty” products and mapping a path for millions more dollars in sales.
Alaska’s fisheries produce more than 5 billion pounds of seafood each year. When all the fish is headed and gutted or filleted and all the crab legs are clustered, it leaves about 3 billion pounds of trimmings. Some is turned into meal and oil, but for the most part, the “gurry” is ground up and discharged into local waterways.
“Whether that’s heads or guts, milt, or meal or oil or something else, it should be held in high regard,” said Andy Wink, a seafood economist formerly with the McDowell Group. “These are products that are out of our normal range but they are specialty items serving niche markets.”
A new Analyses of Specialty Alaska Seafood Products report compiled for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute takes a look at uses for fish heads, oil, meal, internal organs, crab products, roe, herring fillets, arrowtooth flounder, spiny dogfish and skates.
It makes the point that Alaska’s combined seafood catches, valued at roughly $2 billion at the docks and twice that when processors sell to their buyers, could be worth an additional $700 million or more if so called “specialty” products were added to the mix.
Take fish heads, for example. Alaska produces about 1 billion pounds of fish heads per year, which likely account for most of the processing waste, the report said. Just 1 percent is sold as frozen heads, although a single large salmon head can fetch up to $5 a pound at Beijing supermarkets, according to previous reports. Increasing the frozen market alone could add $100 million to processors’ sales, the report said.
Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News