Clean Seas hits its stride with yellowtail

Finding the right balance between production and market demand has been a challenge in the past, but Clifford Ashby, managing director of Clean Seas Tuna, is confident that the Australian company has hit its stride with yellowtail kingfish (Seriola lalandi), a species that it introduced to the European market just five years ago.

Yellowtail’s popularity in Europe is growing steadily, said Ashby at the European Seafood Exposition in Brussels, Belgium, on Thursday. In fact, the fish — which is native to the waters of Australia and New Zealand and is farmed in the open waters of South Australia’s Spencer Gulf — is on the menu at many of Europe’s finest restaurants, often labeled as “Clean Seas Yellowtail.”

Clean Seas estimates that its yellowtail, known as hiramasa in Japan, is menued at 10 to 20 percent of the Michelin-starred restaurants in many of Europe’s major city; there are a total of about 1,300 Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe.

Ashby attributed yellowtail’s expanding popularity to the hard work of his European-based sales team. “They got the word out,” he said. “It was not a well-know species” at the time.

But it wasn’t an easy road. In addition to familiarizing European chefs with an obscure species, Clean Seas had to strike the right balance between production and market demand. Initially, over-production dogged the company. But since then Clean Seas has curbed its production and is churning out 2,500 to 3,000 metric tons of yellowtail annually. And now the company is eyeing the potential of ramping up production next year; like Atlantic salmon, kingfish take 18 months to grow to market size.

Clean Seas is also having success with yellowtail in the U.S. market. After the International Boston Seafood Show in mid-March, the company arranged a “chefs’ table” with 30 of Boston’s top chefs, so that they could sample the product and receive direct feedback. The event was a success, said Ashby.

Ashby added that demand for Clean Seas’ yellowtail has strengthened since the early March earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

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