Marine Farms Vietnam on Tuesday announced that sales of the company’s akvacobia brand of farmed cobia have increased from 5,000 pounds to 20,000 pounds per month during the first four months of its official launch in the U.S. market.
The cobia has proved popular over a wide spectrum of the market, including grocery-store chains, cruise-ship lines, casinos and seafood restaurants and markets, and retail sales have been particularly strong in the Midwest where mild whitefish are especially popular, according to Marine Farms Vietnam.
The sharp increase in such a short period took the company by surprise, said Harvey Lipman, cobia project manager for Nordic Group, the exclusive North American sales and marketing organization for Marine Farms Vietnam. “While we have plenty of product to meet the increased demand, we did not expect farmed cobia to take off so fast,” he said.
Lipman attributed the campaign’s early success to the market’s interest in finding a new, sustainable whitefish fillet that’s an alternative to grouper, red snapper, halibut, mahimahi and cod, which can be more expensive and difficult to source.
Lipman predicted that akvacobia sales will surpass 40,000 pounds per month by the third quarter of 2011, as he expects existing customers to increase their orders and awareness of farmed cobia to rise.
The company also announced that it has leased a hatchery in Vietnam’s Nha Trang area to test out a larval-rearing protocol, the first step in potentially building its own hatchery to increase its source of juveniles. This puts Marine Farms on track to expand capacity to 4,000 metric tons by 2014.
