The 2024 Seafood Excellence Awards, held at Seafood Expo North America in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., celebrated the best new seafood products to hit the market last year.
The competition’s 2024 winners – a salmon salami and a shrimp slider – used seafood proteins in unexpected and contemporary ways.
The winners were chosen on a variety of factors, including appropriateness to the market, taste profile, uniqueness, packaging, market potential, convenience, nutritional value, and originality. Eleven Seafood Excellence Awards finalists were selected prior to the live event, which was held on the first day of the expo. The judges included Jason Driskill, the vice president of seafood at San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A.-headquartered H-E-B; Bob Donegan, the president of Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based restaurant chain Ivar’s; and Robin Fisher, the director of corporate purchasing at Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A.-based HF Foods Group.
Highland Farms, a Scotland-headquartered smoked and value-added salmon producer, won the Best New Retail Product category for its salmon salami. The company was represented at SENA by CEO Jonathan Brown and his daughter Jade Brown.
The Browns were inspired to try to produce their salami after sampling a trout salami in the Czech Republic. Their salami, which is air dried for 16 days, went through a rigorous product testing process, that the team said felt interminable while it was going on, though they couldn’t be more thrilled with the results.
“It feels like forever,” Brown said of the production process, “but it’s amazing.”
Social Kitchens Professional/SK Foods Brand won the Best New Foodservice Product category for its premium shrimp sliders, which SK told SeafoodSource are “made with solid chunks of shrimp, [with] no binders, fillers, scraps, or gluten.”
SK Brand Director of Product Development Kenneth Fryer told the SeafoodSource Presents podcast that the product had been inspired by a need in the market. In his communication with the chefs SK serves, Fryer found that many weren’t happy with the quality of the shrimp sliders and burgers they were being offered.
“A lot of the products that were available in the market weren’t really hitting the mark,” Fryer said. “There were a lot of challenges with handleability, performance, flavor, and taste, and also they were filled with a lot of binders and fillers that chefs really didn’t want.”
SK set itself a mission to build a better shrimp slider, which Fryer described as a “solid shrimp burger that’s in a smaller format.”
There were some unexpected challenges
“When you think of a shrimp burger
Fryer said it was meaningful to have his team’s product “go before a great panel of judges that really looks at all those small details.”
“It’s very validating” to win, he concluded.
Highland’s Brown put it another way.
“[The Seafood Excellence Awards] is the food Oscars of the seafood business, and we just won an Oscar; we’re proud of it.”
