With its latest innovative product, Singapore-based seafood firm Lam Kee Fisheries wants to bring the fine-dining restaurant experience of Chilean seabass into consumers’ home kitchens.
“For Chilean seabass, you only really get to eat it in high-level, expensive restaurants, but now that it’s available online, you can buy it and then have it at home. You can prepare it in less than 10 minutes. Who doesn’t love that?” Jansen Chew, the head of sales and marketing at Lam Kee Fisheries, told SeafoodSource. “We were hoping to get this entire concept together to really produce an exotic, premium seafood at very affordable prices.”
Earlier this year, the company unveiled its Snow Treasures Miso-Marinated Cod Cube, a pre-portioned and ready-to-cook product designed to make Chilean seabass more accessible. For Chew, the new product reflects consumers’ growing preference for ready-to-cook products that they can make at home over the traditional method of purchasing the various components from the supermarket to combine at home.
“We have been observing that there is a trend in consumer preferences,” Chew said. “People are always looking for ready-to-cook meals.”
Singapore seafood suppliers had already been trending toward ready-to-cook products, Chew noted, but most of those products utilized salmon or other seafood products. With Chilean seabass – a premium species that is more frequently found in high-level restaurants than in people’s pantries – Chew said he felt like he had something special. The company had already been working with the fish and eventually decided to explore ways to utilize the fish in a ready-to-cook, affordable format.
“We have always been trying to experiment with the sources or getting the correct, ideal formulations,” Chew said. “It was really a lot of formulation and making sure the taste was suitable for the Asian market.”
In the process, the company experimented with a chili cod concept and garlic cod concept but ultimately settled on the miso-marinated formulation.
“We feel that miso is the most suitable for the Asian market,” Chew noted.
The end result was the Snow Treasures Miso-Marinated Cod Cube: Chilean seabass hand-cut into bite-sized cubes and marinated in a miso glaze. The company is marketing the product to both consumers looking for a premium fish that’s easy to cook at home as well as restaurants looking to cut down prep time without sacrificing quality.
“We just launched it this year, so we are really just hoping to launch it in the retail scene for consumers, and [we are] hoping that this would be a staple item for chefs for hotels and restaurants because they save time trying to prepare them. We already did everything!” Chew said.
One of the company’s goals was to help connect consumers with premium seafood products they see and like on social media but might consider too exotic or expensive to try to cook at home.
“People are always looking through social media – Instagram, TikToks, or whatever – and they’re always looking like, ‘Hey, this one-star Michelin [restaurant] has this particular cod fish,’” Chew said. “If we are able to bring that item to a price point that is affordable to the mass consumers, everybody loves it.”
Chew saw the Seafood Excellence Asia Awards, which are held annually at Seafood Expo Asia in Singapore, as a prime opportunity to highlight the cuisine of the host city of Singapore and entered the Chilean seabass product in the competition.
“Let’s make Singapore proud because it’s a local dish. It’s conceptualized in Singapore,” Chew said.
Not only was the Miso-Marinated Cod Cube named a finalist in the awards, it won the Best New Product award when the event was judged live 10 September at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Singapore. [Editor’s note: Diversified, which runs Seafood Expo Asia, owns and operates SeafoodSource.]
“I guess we were lucky,” Chew said of the award. “The stars aligned perfectly.”
