PSPA wishes everyone a Happy New Year, updates will resume Monday, January 4th.
Alaska
Alaska Sea Grant Marks a Half Century of Service
Fishermen's News - December 30, 2020
Alaska Sea Grant is celebrating 50 years of service to the state through research, education and outreach events which have benefitted coastal communities, ecosystems and the state’s overall economy. Over the past five decades, Alaska Sea Grant and its Marine Advisory Program agents have provided a variety of training classes and technical assistance that has helped meet demands from everything from safe ways to smoke fish to responding to animal stranding to dealing with issues related to climate change.
http://fnonlinenews.blogspot.com/2020/12/alaska-sea-grant-marks-half-century-of.html
Second COVID relief bill includes money for fisheries
KFSK by Joe Viechnicki - December 30, 2020
The COVID relief bill signed into law this week includes hundreds of millions of dollars more for the fishing industry.
https://www.kfsk.org/2020/12/30/second-covid-relief-bill-includes-money-for-fisheries/
National
The Top Stories of 2020: Check Out the Most Read Stories on SeafoodNews
Urner Barry by Amanda Buckle - December 30, 2020
As 2020 comes to a close, SeafoodNews is looking back at our top read stories of the year. And, of course, most of those stories revolve around the coronavirus.
SeafoodNews first began reporting on the coronavirus on January 6, when authorities in China were still referring to it as a “mysterious pneumonia outbreak” linked to a seafood market in Wuhan. Since then the coronavirus has spread across the globe, affecting almost every aspect of our daily lives. Over the past 12 months we’ve covered the coronavirus’ impact on the seafood industry in depth. You can check out some of those stories by clicking the links below.
The Cancellation of Seafood Expo North America
Seafood Expo North America (SENA) is the must-attend seafood event in North America, attracting 22,150 seafood industry professionals in 2019, as well as 1,329 exhibitors from 49 countries. So it should come as no surprise that SeafoodNews readers were heavily interested in updates as the coronavirus began to spread leading up to the Boston Seafood Show. Our top read story of the year was a list of exhibitors that began pulling out in the final weeks leading up to the show. Despite the SENA showrunners implementing new protocols and safety measures, including a “no contact, no handshake policy,” companies that decided to withdraw early from the show expressed concerns about putting their employees and customers at risk.
The 2020 event, which was supposed to take place from March 15-17, was postponed on March 3. It was rescheduled for September 2020, but ultimately canceled in late June. The 2021 show was originally scheduled for March 14-16, but has since been postponed to July 11-13. Seafood Expo Global 2021, which will be taking place at the Gran Via in Barcelona, Spain, was postponed until September.
Restaurant Closures
Prior to the pandemic it was estimated that 70% of seafood was consumed at restaurants. When the U.S. started to go into lockdown in March, indoor dining at restaurants was the first thing to go. Seafood producers saw a drastic cutback in sales as restaurant operators shifted to take-out and delivery. SeafoodNews readers turned to us in March as we compiled a list of every state that closed restaurants due to the coronavirus. In May we revisited the topic with an updated list of when states were allowing restaurants to reopen, and the new restrictions that were being put in place to keep customers safe. Since November we’ve been keeping track of new restrictions and capacity limits as the coronavirus begins to surge again. You can find the latest on restaurant closures here.
The Winding Glass
SeafoodNews founder John Sackton may have retired in 2019, but he still writes his “The Winding Glass column” for us. This year his opinion and commentary column covered all aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. A list of his top five most read columns of the year can be found below:
The Winding Glass: Can Seafood Distributors Survive, and What Will This Summer Look Like?
The Winding Glass: How the Coronavirus Shockwave May Impact the U.S. and Canadian Seafood Industry
The Winding Glass: Pandemic Spreads Uncertainty in all Directions for Seafood Sector
The Winding Glass: Industry Must Prepare as Coronavirus Rapidly Changing Supply Chain Behavior
The Winding Glas: Processors Now Key to Lobster and Crab Survival in Canada
Non-Coronavirus Related
Yes, our readers did care about subjects other than the coronavirus in 2020. One of our most read stories of the year was a look at the top 10 seafood items consumed in the U.S. in 2018. Shrimp was once again the most consumed seafood item, with 4.6 lbs. eaten per capita. You can find the full list here.
In February all eyes were on China’s announcement that they were cutting tariffs on $75 billion worth of U.S. goods, including 100 seafood items. You can read the story here.
The Russian military’s aggression towards Alaska’s pollock fleet in the Bering Sea in late August captured a lot of attention. Alaska fishermen reported getting threatening messages from Russian military warships, who eventually forced them to leave the area where they were fishing. The Russian ships were ultimately there for a pre-planned Russian military exercise, which was known to some U.S. military officials, but not shared widely with the Coast Guard or fleets that access the waters. Stephanie Madsen, the Executive Director for the At-Sea Processors Association, was supposed to deliver a testimony at a hearing of the Subcommittee on Security in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Transportation, and Science, on September 22. The hearing was postponed indefinitely, but Madsen’s written testimony was made available. She wrote that: “Our sovereign right to legally fish within the U.S. EEZ must be protected. Our concerns are heightened by recent proclamations by members of the Russian Duma calling into question the legitimacy of the U.S./Russia boundary line—a cornerstone of the framework for our federal fisheries. Russian naval exercises cannot be allowed to serve as a deterrent to the fully legitimate operations of a U.S. fishing fleet that competes directly with the Russian seafood industry in global markets for pollock, Pacific cod, and other groundfish.” The full story on Madsen’s testimony can be found here.
There was a lot of interest in Trident Seafoods in September when CEO Joe Bundrant revealed that three key executives would be departing as part of a company reorganization. You can learn more here.
In November Peter Pan Seafoods CEO Barry Collier captured attention when he announced that long-time owner Maruha Nichiro would be selling “a major portion of the assets” of Peter Pan to an American holding company made up of Northwest Fish Company and McKinley Capital. You can find the full story here.
https://www.seafoodnews.com/Story/1188388/The-Top-Stories-of-2020-Check-Out-the-Most-Read-Stories-on-SeafoodNews
Labeling and Marketing
Bait and switch: Mislabeled salmon, shrimp have biggest environmental toll
UW News - December 23, 2020
Seafood is the world’s most highly traded food commodity, by value, and the product is hard to track from source to market. Reports of seafood mislabeling have increased over the past decade, but few studies have considered the overall environmental effects of this deceptive practice.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/23/bait-and-switch-mislabeled-salmon-shrimp-have-biggest-environmental-toll/
Federal Register
Fisheries of the Exclusive Economic Zone Off Alaska; Pacific Cod in the Gulf of Alaska
A Rule by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on 12/31/2020
NMFS is opening directed fishing for Pacific cod by various sectors in the Gulf of Alaska (GOA). This action is necessary to fully use the 2021 total allowable catch (TAC) of Pacific cod in the GOA.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/12/31/2020-28967/fisheries-of-the-exclusive-economic-zone-off-alaska-pacific-cod-in-the-gulf-of-alaska
FYI’s
Alaska Marine Science Symposium Goes All Virtual for 2021, Registration Remains Open
Fishermen's News - December 30, 2020
Alaska’s premier marine research conference is going all virtual in 2021, a decision prompted by health and safety needs in the midst of a global pandemic, but one that has hardly damped enthusiasm of participating harvesters, processors and fisheries scientists.
http://fnonlinenews.blogspot.com/2020/12/alaska-marine-science-symposium-goes.html
Opinion
The Winding Glass: Part 2 of 2020 a Year of Turmoil, Loss, and Resilience
SeafoodNews.com by John Sackton - December 29, 2020
[The Winding Glass is an opinion and commentary column by John Sackton, Founder of SeafoodNews]
Yesterday we published the first part of our review of 2020, focusing on how our industry coped and was shaped by the pandemic. Please look at that article if you haven't read it. The following is part 2:
Today we want to focus on our resilience. We learned many new things that will help propel our industry forward, and we learned that some of the overall trends in our industry continued unabated, pandemic disruption or not.
Seafood has always had a unique role among the center of the plate proteins in the American diet. It is the healthiest protein. It has the lowest carbon footprint, and the least environmental impact. It has the greatest variety of taste, texture and mouthfeel.
Benefits of Home Cooking
The downside has been that Americans, unlike their counterparts in France, Spain, Italy, Japan and Korea have been unwilling to cook much seafood at home. Surveys show this is largely due to fear of failure, or fears that a household member won’t like fish. Also the memory of when retail buyers used to get the worst, 10 day old fish that stank up the kitchen, have remained embedded in the consumer psyche even though this practice has been discontinued for 35 years.
When the pandemic stopped consumers from eating out and forced them to stay home with more time on their hands the benefits of home cooking, healthy and a varied diet redounded to seafood’s benefit.
Americans found they could learn to cook seafood. That is was easy and simple. That it had variety, pizzaz, and value. The result was an explosion of retail buying.
There is every hope that this expansion of interest will continue into 2021 and beyond. In short, consumer demand is forcing retailers to once again upgrade their seafood offerings, to the immense benefit of our industry.
A Summer of Respite: Tourism
A second observation is that seafood consumption is heavily tied to coastal tourism. This is certainly true in countries like Japan, where tourism is what has long supported the snow crab market. However, it is increasingly true in America as well.
Lobsters and fried fish in New England, blue crabs in the Chesapeake, shrimp and grouper in Florida and the Gulf, and salmon in the pacific northwest all contribute to the regional experience visitors seek when they travel there.
The shutdown of international travel meant a boom in local tourism this year. In May, businesses in Maine and Cape Cod thought the summer season would be a complete bust. They were wrong. Instead, with a respite from the worst of the virus, people travelled to vacation spots, rentals were full and demand for local seafood was strong.
This helped many companies survive. And it points to the long term value of regional seafood identities. Like health and variety, the ability of seafood to have a regional attribute contributed to its vitality during the pandemic. Again this is a long term benefit that can be leveraged into the future.
A Bifurcated Industry
We sell our products by species and item and there is great variation in the sales channels for different species. This has meant that although some products have sold well and have had a normal year in terms of price variation and availability, other products have collapsed.
The principal difference is how dependent a particular item is on foodservice demand. So for example, products like oysters, halibut, frozen salmon, and frozen cod are all trading at either single year or multiple year lows. This is due to the collapse of normal buyer demand, and is a direct result of the loss of restaurant business in the pandemic.
Single species producers, like oyster farmers, for example, have simply nowhere to go with their product, and they are suffering huge losses.
Other products like fresh salmon, crab, lobster, and shrimp, which all have strong retail components, are trading either within their normal range or at new highs.
This mix has allowed seafood distributors and wholesalers, who typically carry all of these products, to survive even when they were primarily foodservice facing. These distributors have been able to find outlets for their products that are in demand at home.
The same has been true for producers. Those companies that have access to a variety of species and product forms proved more resilient in some cases than those that were single species producers. This will accelerate the ongoing trend of consolidation in our industry.
More Consolidation, More Capital Investment
To survive this year meant having access to capital. It was expensive to retool plants and change production procedures. Furthermore the expense of quarantine, travel, and operating in remote communities safely dramatically increased. This has meant that only the financially stronger companies were able to absorb these expenses. So for example, we saw the sale of Peter Pan by Maruha to an Alaskan private equity group. There are rumors of the potential sale of the private equity stake in American Seafoods to Coastal Villages.
Other Alaskan native corporations with long term access to capital have also been on a buying spree. And in one of the biggest deals in Canada, Clearwater Seafoods was sold to a consortium involving native groups and a corporate partner, Premium Brands.
In Massachusetts, Blue Harvest bought 12 Carlos Rafael’s vessels and 27 fishing permits in February of this year, after having purchased the vessels operated by Atlantic Trawlers in Maine the previous year. This makes the company, a processor of scallops and groundfish, the largest diversified fleet operator in New England.
In Europe, the investments in land based salmon companies continued unabated. And there remains plenty of private equity money chasing seafood opportunities.
The run-up in stock markets and low to zero interest money has created a huge appetite for seafood investment, because the fund managers can see as well as anyone the long term increases in seafood value as demand for wild seafood exceeds supply.
The pandemic strengthened this trend, and spurred deals rather than discouraged them.
These acquisitions are mostly on the producer end of the business. Distributors and restaurant chains were the weaker partners often getting bought up, as with Legal Seafoods, or struggling with expenses and debt due to the failure of their restaurant customers.
There may yet be a negative ripple effect from the permanent closure of restaurants. Broadliners like Sysco and US Foodservice have taken steps to protect themselves by cutting costs, but so far it is government assistance that is keeping some bankruptcies at bay. It is unclear how much the new stimulus package may address this issue, or simply kick it down the road.
Innovation Galore
Innovation has saved our industry. The rapid evolution of online ordering, making inventories visible to buyers, and connecting individual consumers with online seafood orders has been a major factor in keeping seafood moving.
This could not have been accomplished without a revolution in quality and consumer trust. 20 years ago, online ordering of seafood was hindered by the uneven quality and description of the products. Consumers were never sure of what they were getting. Was that sockeye fillet a twice frozen left over from two years ago nearing its expiration date? Was that shrimp triple soaked? There has been a general improvement in standards and quality so that more consumers are satisfied with what they buy, leading to repeat business. Some have even exploited the opportunities in the pandemic, buying high quality frozen seafood that was originally sold primarily to independent chefs.
Other innovations have involved keeping production and transportation safe. Despite the pandemic, the industry overall has designed systems that work. In December, a local post office employee told me that over 200 postal workers in the Concord NH distribution center were out sick or in quarantine. This is one of the reasons mail service has collapsed. They simply could not deal with the increase in volume due to the pandemic.
Yet the seafood industry has avoided such calamities, and has managed to keep products flowing, including imports. This is a remarkable achievement.
Finally, there is menu innovation going on around take out and prepared food. One of the reasons for frozen lobster popularity is that it has shown itself to be a successful ingredient. Lobster mac and cheese can be a staple takeout dish that can be reheated, while a whole lobster might not be. As restaurants have experimented with menus, some seafood items have benefited. This type of experimentation will continue into next year, particularly as the foodservice industry feels its way back.
Vaccine on the Horizon
The year ends on a hopeful note. A vaccine rollout means that the end of the pandemic is actually in sight in 2021. Both my daughter in law, a doctor, and my niece, a nurse practitioner, have already been vaccinated. As has a neighbor in a nursing home. This is an immense relief.
And it means that we will be dealing with rebuilding in 2021. After the Spanish flu in 1918/19 came the decade of the roaring 20’s. The stock market certainly seems to be anticipating this. There is a lot of innovation in the pipeline including new food products, energy efficiency, electric cars, upgraded infrastructure, and medical breakthroughs, all of which may get greater range in the coming years, boosting all our fortunes. This is the glass half-full view.
So I feel our year ends on a hopeful note. At the end of the musical Hamilton Eliza sings "who lives, who dies, who tells your story." We are survivors. We have a lot of positive trends working for us in the coming years: the move to frozen food, the upgrading of retail seafood, the building of a more resilient supply chain, lots of access to capital, and a rebirth of restaurant and foodservice culture.
I hope this time next year we can look back and see we have moved forward in all these areas.
https://www.seafoodnews.com/Story/1188447/The-Winding-GlassPart-2-of-2020-a-Year-of-Turmoil-Loss-and-Resilience
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