Posts Tagged ‘market’


Farmed Fish Direct to Restaurants

February 16th, 2009 by Hayley

US company, Bell Aquaculture, is set to supply perch filets to three Delaware County restaurants with the ultimate goal of selling 8.5 million pounds of fish per year by 2015. everystockphoto-2182170-l

Bell Aquaculture  supplied yellow perch filets to the chef of the Purdue University Agricultural Alumni Fish Fry, as a trial run for the plan to distribute perch to restaurants.

Their plan is to supply fish directly to restaurants, skipping the traditional supply chain.

Having identified the potential market at 38 million pounds with the current market now less than two million pounds, there is forth sight for substantial growth.

Bell Aquaculture hopes to be producing more than 30,000 pounds of perch filets each month by August.

Currently, 20 employees are handling the production, with a predicted increase to 120 employees.

With the possibility of providing yellow perch filets to hundreds or thousands of restaurants in the United States, there might be a potential for a market worldwide.

If restaurants are expressing interest greater than Bell Aquaculture can single handily produce, could this altering of the supply chain (reducing prices as low as possible and  guaranteeing a fresh product) provoke market growth and provide a key solution towards reducing the global fish production gap?

 

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Tilapia markets and dealing with net loss

November 3rd, 2008 by Andrew

There have been a fair few posts regarding solving the problem of fish feed. At its base, we can’t continue feeding fish to fish – even, resulting in net loss – a practice that is difficult to sustain, and definitely not efficient or environmentally friendly. Even industry leading FCR’s (Feed Conversion Ratios) for predatory fish like salmon.

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Oceans/Aquaculture/Salmon/Net_Loss.asp

In the meantime, there are other species of fish like carp and tilapia which are , ‘easy maintenance’ fish like carp or tilapia that are both more disease resistant, monivorous, efficient to feed and don’t cause net loss in fish. Why fight an uphill battle trying to raise fish that aren’t suited to the conditions, and are costly to produce? Why not farm Tilapia instead?

One of the problems is that they are not considered ‘high value’ fish – in fact, in the wild, they’re considered pests.

Instead of innovating with feed, why don’t we innovate with markets?

Tilapia are considered good eating fish elsewhere, and the market in the US is both sizeable and growing, as are markets in our region:

http://www.infofish.org/marketreports/tilapia0607.html

http://www.thefishsite.com/articles/388/tilapia-market-report-january-2008

http://www.thefishsite.com/fishnews/5014/muhyiddin-wants-greater-participation-in-tilapia-farming

A little market experimentation and investment in the fish in the US has helped it gain popularity here – perhaps retailers could trial something similar here.

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Seafood Plus project

September 21st, 2008 by Andrew

The Seafood Plus project is an EU 6th Framework project bringing together over 70 research institutions to work on over 20 research proposals.

It is the largest aquaculture project ever funded by the EU at 26m Euros.

The aim of the project is to make it possible to reduce health problems, to prevent major diseases and to increase well-being among European consumers by using the opportunity to apply the benefits obtained through consumption of health promoting and safe seafood products of high eating quality.

Sea food is widely defined and includes finfish. The project will focus on 6 research areas:

  • Seafood and human nutrition
  • Seafood and consumer behavior and wellbeing
  • Seafood safety
  • Seafood from source to consumer product
  • Seafood from aquaculture
  • Seafood traceability to ensure consumer confidence

A key theme of the project is therefore to increase demand for seafood by bolstering customer confidence through improved traceability – they term it “from fork to farm”.

They have looked into technologies such as RFID. They have also done very interesting work around understanding the market demand for fish, for example highlighting that many people want the benefits of Omega 3 through a tablet rather than a whole fish due to taste and odour considerations, and also that fish needs to be adapted to suit popular modern cooking techniques such as stir frying.

I think this is a particularly valuable area of research as the majority of the research cited on this site appears to be motivated by a push strategy (i.e. being led by the industry) whereas this research represents a pull strategy, i.e. being led by the market.

Summaries of their results so far can be found at http://www.seafoodplus.org/Popular_articles.327.0.html 

Further information about the project can be found at http://www.seafoodplus.org/Home.326.0.html

It is also possible to become an Associate Member of the Seafood Plus project, giving access to their research findings faster and in clear language.

This is mainly designed for aquaculture SMEs and larger businesses but may be something that members of the Finfish community could be interested in? More details are available at http://www.seafoodplus.org/Associates_of_SEAFOODp.395.0.html

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