At the end of the day, if a seafood buyer can’t get the product he or she needs, then it’s time to consider other species or other proteins (gasp!) to put on the menu. As SeaFood Business examined the results of its biennial foodservice survey, it was evident that many restaurateurs and operators share similar concerns and challenges relating to sourcing, pricing and sustainability.
According to 65 percent of foodservice buyers, their top concerns are sourcing/product availability, followed by wholesale prices, sustainability, customers’ limited discretionary income, rising energy costs, food safety, labor, competing with retail for takeout business and traffic.
“One of the most common questions we field is about salmon and the difference between wild and farm-raised,” says Bill Bayne, president and co-founder of Fish City Grill in Austin, Texas. His restaurants menu both, and his managers are focusing on educating diners on where their seafood comes from. “People like to know about the origin of their food, both from a quality standpoint and from pure curiosity,” he says. Freshness/quality was cited as buyers’ top customer concern related to seafood at 69 percent.
If you’re serving crab close to crab packing houses like Rich Evanusa does at Beach to Bay Seafoods in Princess Anne, Md., you have to make sure it’s local, not imported.
On the Eastern Shore, people do not want to be buying imported, pasteurized crabmeat,” he says. Evanusa has established relationships with particular watermen and says he’s willing to pay a premium to maintain his quality standards. Rising prices for seafood have become challenging for restaurateurs, and many have been reluctant to raise their menu prices for fear of losing their customers. The last time SeaFood Business surveyed foodservice buyers in 2010, 48 percent of respondents said their menu prices were increasing, but this year that number rose to 67 percent, with the majority citing increased wholesale prices as the reason.
Bayne says that just being able to provide affordable, fresh seafood for diners at Fish City Grill is challenging. “Availability is there but the prices are rising. Sometimes we take those price increases on the chin a bit and sometimes we raise prices on other things, like desserts and drinks, to compensate,” he says.
Evanusa recently raised his menu prices too, the first time in 18 months. “The challenge of operating is deciding, can you raise prices to the point where a consumer can still afford to purchase them?” he says. “Our watermen need a certain amount of money to harvest the product because of fuel and insurances, so they need to sell to us at a certain price. And we can only afford to raise our price to a certain degree before our customer says ‘no.’”
One thing customers appear to be saying ‘yes’ to is an increasing variety of seafood species on restaurant menus. Up to 34 percent of survey respondents said they were menuing more seafood this year than last year. Fish City Grill is one of them, offering more and varied farmed and wild species today than in years past. It’s also among many restaurants that are introducing more seafood-topped pastas and salads on their menus. “We add items like these to our chalk boards as specials of the day,” says Bayne. “It’s what our customers want, and dishes like these generate a higher margin per serving than other seafood items.”
Additional survey information can be seen in the December issue of SeaFood Business.
Contributing Editor Lauren Kramer writes the monthly Behind the Line column in Seafood Business magazine.
