April 6, 2016 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — As the US east coast sea scallop fishing season ramps up, two of the world’s biggest scallops companies see prices at a plateau for now with tight supply in 2016 poised to ease soon after
Speaking to Undercurrent News at the headquarters of Eastern Fisheries, the world’s largest scallop firm, executive vice-president Joe Furtado said that decreased US scallop supplies are expected to keep prices elevated, at least for a little while.
“The overall outlook for this year is still down as a whole but the overall outlook for 2017 is a significant rebound from a supply perspective,” Joe Furtado, executive vice-president of Eastern Fisheries said. “So I think we’ve made some market corrections due to the reality that there’s just less scallops this year but in anticipation of a rebound in 2017, I think you’ll start to see receding pricing in the back half of this year.”
Eastern has two processing factories in New Bedford, another two in northeastern China, one of which is also used for flatfish processing, and a third recently opened in Staphorst, Netherlands that handles all of the company’s European scallops. The company is co-owned by two family businesses, O’Hara Corporation and Nordic Fisheries, which together own a fleet of 26 scallop vessels.