A Scotsman’s journey from motorcycle ace to fish (box) king

Until a serious crash put an end to his professional motorbike racing career a few years ago, Scotsman Magnus Houston had given no thought to any other job, let alone one at sea.

While recovering from his injuries, Houston joined a friend on a creel boat and realized that pitting his wits against the natural elements might just satisfy his need for adrenaline. And so began a new life as a fisherman, on the east coast of Scotland, catching lobster and crab.

However, excitement with his new life soon turned to disappointment, as the catch was regularly snapped up by buyers selling into the European market.

“I felt that local people were missing out because they couldn’t buy the type of seafood I was landing, so I started selling to local restaurants on my route home and was really encouraged by their positive feedback,” said Houston.

Soon, chefs began asking for additional seafood supplies and Houston started to source fish and shellfish from other local boats and markets to satisfy the growing demand. In 2011, he decided to stop fishing and to sell fish straight from the boat, along with local game products, and his company, Coast & Glen, was born.

As the wholesale business grew, so too did the germ of an idea to expand the customer base by selling direct to the public.

The result was a sister business, Fishbox, set up in May 2014, which delivers fresh seafood, conveniently packed, and delivered straight to the consumer, within 24 hours of landing.

The Fishbox model addresses issues with fish consumption, such as a lack of synergy between local fish shops’ opening times and customers’ working hours, a lack of time and uncertainty about how to prepare seafood, and planning ahead for meals.

“I was the first to set up a dedicated Fishbox scheme for seafood and borrowed the concept from veg-box schemes which are very popular in the U.K.,” explained Houston.

Customers choose how much they want to spend, how often they want seafood delivered, whether they want fillets or whole fish, skin on or off, and Fishbox does the rest, packing a surprise selection from the 60 or so seafood products freshly available.

Information about the catch method is supplied, along with a preparation guide and recipe. In this way, Fishbox brings new fish species to the public’s attention, reduces pressure on popular species, and allows the company to generate a reasonable profit at a price point attractive to the customer.

Fishbox already services 1,000 regular weekly, fortnightly and monthly orders, along with gift box orders, and Houston is proud to have updated a traditional fish van-type business, through use of modern technology and social media, into a new fish selling concept. To date, a loyal community of 6,000 engaged Facebook followers and 2,000 Twitter followers has been built up.

Fishbox is now taking that concept a stage further, working with Stirling University to develop a picking/packing algorithm, and Houston is excited that it will put him one step ahead of traditional fish sellers, once the new Landing Obligation comes into force for demersal fish from 1 January 2016.

The algorithm will build on an extensive survey undertaken by Fishbox about the likes and dislikes of their customers, together with the challenges of seasonality and availability, to provide a real-time shopping list for the company’s fish buyers on the Scottish markets. Once this is completed in October 2015 the next stage is to create a user-friendly app for ordering that will ensure delivery of a high quality fresh product based on zero waste and a fast stock turnover.

This will be coupled with the unique picking/packing system that is being developed from scratch to incorporate a “knapsack” approach of optimizing efficient product selection in fulfilling orders, while overcoming consumers’ tendency to choose a select or narrow number of popular species.

The business has already grown from 3 to 13 employees and Houston is finalizing an agreement on new Fishbox premises in the Scottish Central Belt, which will help with the logistics of shifting fish around the UK more quickly. Coast and Glen, the wholesale arm, will remain anchored in Inverness.

In the short term, Houston aims to double the number of Fishbox subscriptions by the end of 2015, and to have the new software, algorithm and hardware in operation by April 2016.

“Long-term, I have great ambitions to grow the business and to help grow U.K. seafood consumption, and hopefully, the sky is the limit!” he said.

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