When Mom’s Organic Market (MOM’s) brought in oysters from its own farm in December as a limited-time promotion, it sold all 30,000 oysters rather quickly. While the retail price was very attractive at USD 14 (EUR 11.40) for two dozen Chesapeake Bay oysters, MOMs’ shoppers also seemed to be hungry for fresh, local, sustainable seafood options.
“The oysters had a really warm reception. We sold thousands,” said Scott Nash, founder of the Rockville, Md., USA-based organic grocery chain.
Next, MOM’s — which currently does not have fresh seafood counters — began carrying fresh farmed trout from Limestone Springs Fishing Preserve in Richland, Pa., in some of its stores in December and January. “Customers love that we have a fresh fish option,” said Josh Schwartz, meat and seafood coordinator for MOM’s. “It’s a great, approachable fish for people.” MOM’s is moving a few hundred pounds of trout weekly via select stores as part of a test.
Shoppers have responded so well to the trout and oysters that the chain may test fresh seafood counters in some of its stores in the future. “There are always people asking for more of everything. We will probably test full meat and seafood counters sometime,” Nash said.
Currently, most of its stores carry 15 to 20 frozen, sustainable seafood SKUs and pop-up ice tables are set up with limited-time fresh promotions. “Our focus has been only frozen, but we are starting to experiment with fresh fish,” Schwartz added. “If that goes well, we are considering carrying some local fresh species such as hook-and-line rockfish, trout and blue crab.”
Meanwhile, the chain’s frozen offerings are selling well. A few years ago, MOM’s committed to selling only seafood products rated green, or best choice, by Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program. It also works with an independent consultant to ensure that it is buying only green-rated species from the Chesapeake Bay and other regions.
“We take it a step further than some of competitors that sell ‘good alternative’ fish,” Schwartz said. “Why sell the good alternatives when you can sell the best fish?”
Some of MOM’s own-label frozen seafood SKUs include wild Alaska salmon, Pacific cod, farmed cod, farmed trout, farmed tilapia and farmed shrimp. “I spent a year finding someone who does farm-raised shrimp that is green-rated by Seafood Watch and finally got it into our stores. No wild shrimp gets their ‘best choice’ rating,” Schwartz said.
MOM’s is also planning to roll out Chesapeake Bay blue catfish in some of its stores. The voracious species has taken over some the Bay’s tributaries, eating vegetation, juvenile blue crab, herring, shad and other fish. “We want to introduce this to our customers and make this a species they want to buy,” Schwartz said. “The more we can get people eating this, the more we can get it out of waterways. Hopefully it can become one of our most popular items.”
To that end, MOM’s plans to conduct in-store sampling events of blue catfish with the Wide Net Project, a hunger-relief and environmental improvement effort in Chesapeake Bay that involves the Safina Center at Stony Brook University. “[Blue catfish] doesn’t have the typical muddy flavor of catfish; it is clean, sweet and flaky. We want to have customers taste it and explain why they should be buying it, creating that emotional attachment with the fish.”
While MOM’s would like to add more fresh and frozen species, it is somewhat hampered by its staunch sustainability policy. “The hard part of our commitment is that it’s a challenge to actually track down green-rated species and get them into a frozen fillet so we can sell them,” Schwartz said. For example, the chain has not been able to find green-rated mahimahi or sufficient supplies of Maryland blue crab. “Maryland has been really good at putting reduction devices [in crab pots] so juvenile crab can swim out and it has been several years since an assessment. I’m hopeful we can expand into blue crab at some point,” Schwartz said.
MOM’s executives also want to see greater transparency in the seafood supply chain. To that end, they will soon pilot a program requiring suppliers to list the fishing method, geographic location and other information on each seafood order. “For us, it’s to make sure we are selling the kind of species we want to be selling, and making it transparent for customers. We are trying to reduce the margin of error as much as possible,” Schwartz said.
MOM’s has benefited from a growing movement of American consumers looking for healthy, tasty and sustainable food options. As a result, the organic grocery chain’s sales were up around 20 percent in 2014.
“The market is not suddenly growing; it has now gotten big enough for people to take notice of what it is out there,” Nash said. “It’s the right thing to do. That’s why clean energy continues to grow and sustainable seafood is growing.”
MOM’s executives plan to continue the chain’s steady growth curve, adding three to four stores annually for the foreseeable future. By the end of 2015, MOM’s plans to open four new stores in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Arlington and Woodbridge, Va. And you can bet that future stores will include an ever-expanding selection of fresh and frozen seafood.
