James Parfitt is the co-founder and CEO of New Zealand Wild Catch Limited, a company that catches sea cucumber in New Zealand and exports to China. In an interview with SeafoodSource, Parfitt explained how he’s spent almost a decade researching and establishing his high-end seafood brand, which he recently began marketing through social media and shopping channels.
SeafoodSource: What is the origin story of New Zealand Wild Catch and how have you incorporated that into the branding and marketing of the sea cucumber you sell in China?
Parfitt: The brand’s story revolves around my time in China learning under the tutelage of Chinese professors from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shandong Mariculture Institute, who taught me to adapt processing techniques to our sub-species – sea cucumber. A lot of retail food companies pay exorbitant money to create a brand identity for the Chinese market backed up by big marketing and PR dollars, rather than having an engaging story and provenance from the outset. But I just tell the story [of the company] as it happened – with a chance meeting I had with a professor from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and growing up in a boat access-only area of New Zealand, where sea cucumber were found and which we used to catch as youngsters.
SeafoodSource: What is the market like for sea cucumber in China and how have you achieved success there?
Parfitt: There is also a lot of pressure in the Chinese sea cucumber market from mass volumes of cheap Icelandic and North American or Alaskan species, which are usually frozen, then processed and packaged within China. There is also an incredible overcapacity of domestic farmed sea cucumber, which has seen prices nosedive and aquaculture farms in North East China fall empty.
Other challenges have been from backyard processors in New Zealand, and those supplying them, who sell into China through grey channels, damaging the perception of New Zealand sea cucumber, often by mislabeling tropical or Atlantic species as being from New Zealand. We have overcome these challenges by trusting in our proprietary processes to deliver superior products and by having a brand story with integrity, rather than a story created for Chinese consumers by a consultant in Auckland or Shanghai.
SeafoodSource: What have been the biggest challenges of setting up a premium seafood brand in China?
Parfitt: Even before entering the market, it took me the first seven years of living in China and working in the sea cucumber industry to really understand the market, value chain, desired product characteristics in each region, and to develop the underlying processing IP [intellectual property]. Even then we have had to optimize considerably over the last three years, and scaling up at the same time as entering the China market has been challenging. We have had to face the Chinese government’s curbs on civil servant spending which, prior to mid-2013, had propped up the precious seafood markets in China for sea cucumber, shark fin, dried abalone, etcetera. In that sense we started and continue to operate at a difficult time. In addition, all of the usual suspects such as customs clearance, Chinese inspection and quarantine processing, brand registration and logistics have been challenging, but nothing unexpected for China.
SeafoodSource: Can you explain what you mean by underlying processing IP?
Parfitt: Processing IP is hard to summarize and, again, is commercially sensitive. Our sea cucumber have a very high proportion of mutable collagenous tissues (a type of collagen) which converts freely between a liquid and a solid state (to evade and deter predators). When processing we need to unlock the collagen into a semi-viscous state so that it is palatable but not too soft.
SeafoodSource: How is your brand developing in China and what species are you selling?
Parfitt: New Zealand Wild Catch brand has now been served in Hakkasan, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Shanghai, and also in premium imported-goods supermarkets in Shanghai through to second- and third-tier provincial cities. It is also available on several Chinese social media shopping platforms. The species we wild harvest and hand-craft is called niu jin shen in Chinese, which is a southern sub-species of the native New Zealand sea cucumber. We have two registered-trademark sub-brands, Gold Tip and Black Tip, which have different characteristics, texture profiles, appearance, color and nutritional elements. These are marketed towards different consumer groups in China.
SeafoodSource: What are your plans for the business in China in 2017?
Parfitt: As a small company with a big brand, we rely on engaging our customers with our story, and keeping them loyal by delivering the best hand-crafted sea cucumber products in the world. Our 2017 plans in China are to remain agile, expand distribution in China by building our Chinese social media footprint. Although we have a clear strategy, at the end of the day China is unpredictable. For example, many social media sales channels didn’t exist when we entered the market. With that in mind, a key philosophy of mine is to remain flexible and reactive to challenges and new opportunities, new shopping trends, new platforms, new government initiatives or policy and act on those new opportunities or threats quickly. We have also developed several proprietary abalone products which we are gradually integrating into markets in mainland China.
