Neil Ramsden, deputy editor of Undercurrent News, brings you a roundup of the main stories from the previous week.
The most-read story of last week came on the Saturday just gone, and could be news that anyone selling to China was fearing: the Asian giant has found a live trace of coronavirus on packaging containing frozen fish in the port city of Qingdao.
This is the first time an infectious trace of coronavirus has been detected on frozen food packaging, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, known as the CDC.
Reuters reported the frozen fish is cod, based on a translation from a report from the CDC. Undercurrent News' reporter in China, Hu Luyi, said the same word is used in China for cod and pollock. However, reports around COVID-19 infections in Qingdao port workers have focused on pollock.
The CDC statement also does not specify which country the fish came from, but Russia is the main supplier of headed and gutted (H&G) pollock to the processing sector in Qingdao. US catchers also supply some pollock H&G to China.
Read this in full here.
From just a small offshoot of the main company four years ago, American Penaeid (API), the broodstock arm of Florida-based American Mariculture, has grown to become the world's largest supplier of specific pathogen-free (SPF) vannamei broodstock, wrote Dan Gibson.
With a business built off the back of fierce demand in China, API has now seen its broodstock perform "incredibly" in Indonesia, after sending its first animals to the Southeast Asian country three months ago.
According to API president Robin Pearl, where Indonesia's concerned, the sky's the limit.
"They're now getting to the final part of our first harvest and the results are incredible," he told Undercurrent. "So, I hope that over the next couple of weeks, we're going to start to get some real harvest data and get some real reports; currently we're already getting reorders. And I would assume we're going to take over Indonesia, in the next 12 months we're going to be a major supplier."
For API, which exported 95% of its 330,000 broodstock animals to China next year, there is a real incentive to diversify into other markets. The firm is expecting sales to remain similar this year despite the pandemic, increasing by 20-25% in 2021, Pearl said.
Read this story in full here.
On Oct. 16, the news that Undercurrent has been tracking and expecting for some time finally broke: Eight Fifty Food Group, parent company to the UK's largest seafood processor, Young's Seafood, announced it had agreed a deal for fish finger producer Greenland Seafood.
The companies confirmed the news a few hours after Undercurrent had broken that Nippon Suisan Kaisha was no longer in contention to buy the pollock processor, clearing the way for a deal from CapVest Partners, the private equity backer of Young’s.
If the deal clears the usual regulatory checks, CapVest will own a pan-European seafood processing business with a turnover in excess of $1.2 billion. UK-based Young’s has a turnover of over £600 million ($775m), with Greenland generating sales of around €400m ($468m) from its high-volume, high-efficiency pollock plants in Germany and France.
Young’s and Nissui were tipped as frontrunners for Greenland by Undercurrent sources back in July.
Read the confirmation story here, and the breaking news from earlier on Friday here.
In the US, Jason Huffman reported that one of the fastest-growing seafood companies in the US probably isn’t one you’ve heard of before, and it’s not following any of the conventional approaches.
The Wild Alaskan Company, a three-year-old, direct-to-consumer, monthly subscription service that specializes in sustainable seafood sourced almost exclusively from the state of Alaska, has nearly quadrupled its sales in just the past seven months, during the pandemic, founder and CEO Aaron Kallenberg told Undercurrent in a recent interview.
Though Kallenberg declines to provide his annual revenue, he said his company now has taken on as many as 132,000 members. But the CEO doesn’t think it’s the consumers’ fear of going to restaurants or inside retail locations that's most responsible for his company's rapid growth. Rather, he believes, it’s got a lot more to do with the plummeting price of online consumer advertising that's enabled Wild Alaskan to get triple the bang out of every marketing dollar.
Read this here.
News that suspected toothfish poaching vessel Cobija, formerly named Cape Flower, has been seized by Interpol in the port of Al Mukalla, Yemen, got a lot of reads last week.
The vessel is not on the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR)'s list of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, but it is suspected to have fished illegally in CCAMLR's Antarctic zone.
Cobija was added to the South East Atlantic Fisheries Organization IUU blacklist in 2017; the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission's in 2018; and the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas blacklist, and the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission's, all in 2019.
Read the full story here.
Low US scallop inventories have driven a four-month, 48% price increase, reported Jason Huffman. Brian Maccini, purchasing manager for Raw Seafoods, is seeing something he and others haven’t for a while on the floor of the New Bedford, Massachusetts-based seafood auction -- almost a dozen dealers are bidding on the same Atlantic scallops.
"Their frozen inventories aren’t anywhere near where they should be heading into the winter, so that's why you've seen, if you watch the auction sometimes, especially on [size U-]10/20s, 10 or 11 dealers vying for the scallops that are on the board that day," he told Undercurrent.
Normally, he said, you might have three or four dealers bidding against each other.
The increased competition is driving prices north, as was evident in the review Undercurrent did recently of landings at the auction, more properly known as the Buyers and Sellers Exchange.
Read that in full here.
Mowi reported two suspected detections of infectious salmon anemia (ISA) at a site belonging to its Canadian division, Northern Harvest Sea Farms (NHSF), off the southern coast of Newfoundland.
On Oct. 9 the firm advised that samples taken by the Provincial Government Department of Fisheries, Forestry, and Agriculture’s species-specific aquatic animal health surveillance program had found "suspect detections" of ISA in one fish each from two different sites: McGrath Cove North and Ironskull Point.
The two sites altogether contain over 1 million fish. You can read this in full here.
On Friday American Aquafarms, a US-based aquaculture company established by the founders of Norwegian cod farming venture Norcod, announced it was considering sites for a hatchery, fish farm facilities, and a state-of-the art processing plant in coastal Maine.
American Aquafarms has entered into an agreement to purchase the Maine Fair Trade Lobster facility in Gouldsboro, according to the firm, whose founder and CEO Mikael Rones is also CEO of Global AS, a Norwegian investment company.
There it plans to develop its hatchery and processing facilities. American Aquafarms will also develop a workforce strategy plan to support locally sourced, skilled and unskilled labor during the construction and full production phases, it said.
"We strongly believe that finfish should be farmed in its natural habitat, in the ocean, with the focus on using the best possible technology to reduce our environmental footprint," said Rones. "We look forward to continuing our work with the town of Gouldsboro and area fishermen to share our cutting-edge aquaculture technology that can provide year-round jobs for residents of the region."
Read this in full here.
And in Argentina, new company Acuisocial is on its way to building its first Atlantic salmon recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) in Tornquist, Buenos Aires, the firm's co-manager, Diego Ballarini, told Maria Feijoo.
The company is looking to two candidates, Israel's AquaMaof Aquaculture Technologies -- through its Chilean arm Inno-Sea -- and the Dutch firm Hesy Aquaculture to provide the key-turn facility and to monitor the production, he explained.
"They have already provided us with information and budgets. We have not yet signed any contracts, though, but [AquaMaof] is one of the potential technological partners of our project," Ballarini told Undercurrent.
With an initial investment of about $75 million, Acuisocial aims to develop an aquaculture agribusiness program through RAS and mariculture farms in Argentina, said co-manager Omar Seijo.
Catch this in full here.
October 19, 2020 at 03:30PM
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Editor's recap: China finds live virus trace on import; Shrimp broodstock giant targets Indonesia; Young's nabs Greenland - Undercurrent News
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