Saving Seafood

Economic Impact

COVID-19 accelerating negative trends for pangasius sector

May 28, 2020 — The coronavirus has delivered a large blow to Vietnam’s pangasius sector, which was already hurting before the pandemic.

Vietnam has not recorded any COVID-19 deaths through the crisis, and the entire country has only seen around 300 cases of the disease due to the extensive preventative measures it took beginning in January. But while most of social and economic activities in Vietnam have been brought back to a “new normal” since late April, disruptions in foreign markets, tangled supply chains, and suppressed demand have hurt its seafood export sector, upon which the country’s pangasius traders depend heavily.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Northern Wind, Legit Fish announce partnership

May 28, 2020 — New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based Northern Wind announced 27 May the company has formed a new partnership with Legit Fish, a Boston, Massachusetts-based tech company focusing on seafood traceability.

According to a release from the company, the partnership has been in the works for more than a year, with Northern Wind Chairman Ken Melanson and CEO George Kouri working to “fine-tune the traceability and scalability” of the technology. The new technology will allow Northern Wind to have full traceability of scallops the company sells, including origin, landing date, harvest area, and sustainability profiles.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

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

Seafood industry’s fragmentation makes recovery harder

May 26, 2020 — The seafood lobby says assistance from the federal government has not been enough to help everyone along the supply chain. That is leaving fishermen, processors and distributors worried about their ability to stay in business as the economic slowdown from the pandemic ravages the industry.

Various sectors are getting a $300 million boost from a coronavirus emergency aid package from Congress that will be distributed by states to help make up for lost sales after restaurants closed their doors. In addition, the Agriculture Department has promised to buy up $70 million of catfish, haddock, pollock and redfish to distribute to food banks and nutrition programs.

An industry coalition asked the Trump administration in late March for a combined $4 billion to be spent on buying surplus seafood, supporting supply chains and aiding fisheries, but only a fraction of that has been awarded.

Some in the industry say the meager aid doled out so far reinforces a long-held complaint that the industry is neglected on Capitol Hill, where power players like the beef and pork industries dominate in agriculture. The industry’s fragmented nature also makes it difficult to form a political force, compared with other agriculture sectors that lobby to support producers of a single animal, especially those from politically powerful farm states in the Midwest and South.

“The U.S. fishing industry is overlooked a lot when it comes to the food supply,” said Jason Jarvis, a fisherman in Rhode Island who catches fluke, black sea bass and scup. “Now it’s going to change. I think it has to. We’re looking at empty stores.”

Read the full story at Politico

The Lunacy of Global Seafood Supply Chains

May 21, 2020 — On a recent locked-down day, cars snaked nose-to-tail through downtown. The destination: a seafood “shop,” popped up on a local commercial fishing wharf. For those who made it in time, $15 bought a pound of scallops, or two pounds of haddock, fresh caught, and delivered in vacuum-sealed bags to the car window, exact change please. For the city’s hard-hit fisher folk, here was a rare bit of good news. The pandemic’s shuttering of restaurants has left those who fish, scallop, clam, and lobster for a living without a major market. Boats are docked, crewmembers let go, pain rippling through a web of marine-related businesses.

“A whole big system is falling apart. It’s not just the fishermen but the people who support them,” says Donna Marshall. Marshall heads up Cape Ann Fresh Catch, like a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, but for local seafood. These days her group is dropping off locally caught haddock, hake, cusk, and lobster to customers’ doorsteps. The work of turning whole fish into neat fillets is being done by laid-off workers from area restaurants, the only paying work they have right now.

Homegrown efforts to keep people in local fish can’t match the collapse of an industry; direct-to-consumer sales are a small fraction of what fishermen sell to restaurants. Still, the seaside solidarity that the crisis has brought to Gloucester matters. “You’re paying your neighbor’s mortgage,” Marshall says. “This person has a family. It’s not some faceless conglomerate.”

Read the full story at The Nation

Seafood subscription service triples sales during lockdown, signs deal with Imperfect Foods

May 21, 2020 — Americans are cooking more seafood while stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to The New York Times.

For Ren Ostry, the owner of Culver City, California-based Kitchen Catch, that trend has resulted in a tripling of sales for her subscription seafood service, which touts the environmental and social benefits of eating bycatch and lesser-known species.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Americans Are Cooking More Seafood, but Fishermen Are Struggling

May 21, 2020 — The coronavirus crisis is hitting seafood businesses even harder than the meat industry, prompting fishermen and processors to overhaul their operations and look for new customers.

U.S. supermarket shoppers are buying more fish and shellfish to prepare at home during quarantine, but business owners say the rise isn’t enough to offset the loss of sales to restaurants, where 70% of seafood is consumed, according to market-research firm Urner Barry.

Some companies are also contending with coronavirus outbreaks among workers. Blue Harvest Fisheries, a fishing and processing company in Massachusetts, closed its plant for three days in April after two workers tested positive for Covid-19. The closure cost Blue Harvest $200,000, said CEO Keith Decker, who said he is also paying hourly workers an extra $1 an hour and has added costly fogging and deep-cleaning procedures at the plant each day. At the same time, he said, production is down 25% because of reduced seafood demand and worker absenteeism.

“It’s a tightrope I’m walking,” Mr. Decker said.

In Alaska, which makes up 60% of the nation’s catch, according to the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, seafood companies are spending millions to prevent infection among the armies of workers they bring to the state each year. Executives say virus cases there could hobble operations and devastate remote villages.

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal

Seafood industry hit hard by economic downturn of pandemic

May 19, 2020 — Seafood company managers like Jon Pearlman can see the impact of the coronavirus and economic downturn simply by looking at the trucks leaving the lot.

During a busy season, almost 30 of them are used to transport hundreds of orders every day. However, over the last two months, the amount of trucks has dwindled.

“Today, I’ve got seven,” Pearlman said. “The last two months have been devastating.”

As the president of the Congressional Seafood Company, Pearlman has witnessed the growing popularity of seafood around Maryland and surrounding areas since beginning operations in 1996.

But with the company mainly doing business with high-end restaurants, hotels, and caterers, the economic downturn this year has brought things to a crawl.

“It’s heartbreaking, it’s scary, I’m certainly nervous for the future,” Pearlman said. “Where a restaurant used to maybe spend $1,000 or $1,500 on seafood for their daily allowance, now they have two items that they’re offering carry-out on.”

Read the full story at WUSA