The origins of the smoked salmon industry predate the arrival of the U.K.’s first retail stores by many centuries, yet the appeal of the product has never been stronger than at present.
According to figures from Nielsen Scantrack, the country’s total smoked seafood retail market is currently valued at around GBP 346.3 million (EUR 438.6 million/USD 549.2 million) per year, including more than GBP 171 million (EUR 216.6 million/USD 271.2 million) worth of smoked salmon.
In volume terms, smoked salmon accounts for 8 million metric tons (MT) of the total 26.4 million MT of smoked fish sold in the market. And despite the volume of smoked salmon sold increasing by 4.1 percent in the 12 months ending June 25, the average retail price still grew to GBP 21.26 (EUR 26.87/USD 33.77) per kilogram, a year-on-year increase of 2.7 percent, which is all the more impressive when factoring in that retail food sales have been flat for several quarters.
Tesco, the country’s biggest supermarket chain, has a 28 percent share of the smoked salmon retail market, followed by Sainsbury’s with 21.1 percent and Waitrose in third place with 13 percent. Tesco’s market share of smoked salmon has actually decreased by 2 percent in the last 12 months, but Sainsbury’s and Waitrose have achieved increases of 1.2 percent and 0.3 percent, respectively. Also making a noteworthy advance is fourth-placed Morrisons, which has grown its market share from 8.6 percent to 10.4 percent.
One of the most successful private-label retail launches in the U.K. in the past two years is the Heston from Waitrose Lapsang Souchong Tea Smoked Salmon, created for Waitrose by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal as part of his tie-in with the upper-end supermarket chain that began in 2010 and manufactured by Scottish processor Macrae Edinburgh Ltd.
Using farmed salmon from Scotland, Waitrose’s product is cured in a mixture of sea salt and sugar and then smoked for 10 hours over a mix of oak chippings and Lapsang Souchong tea, which is a black tea originally from the Wuyi region of the Chinese province of Fujian. Waitrose says the manufacturing process “imparts a complex, but delicate smoky flavor.”
Sold in 100-gram packs as part of the fast expanding “Heston from Waitrose” range, the product retails at GBP 4.49 (EUR 5.67/USD 7.13), which places it at the upper-end of the retail spectrum. Nevertheless, buoyed by the feel-good factor of the London 2012 Olympics, sales of the product surged by more than 600 percent in the first week of August and sources expected the trend to continue at least into September.
The product previously enjoyed a sales spike at the start of June, when parties held to mark the Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee sparked a 173 percent growth in sales, and this off the back of a successful year-end holiday performance.
Click here to read the full story which ran in the October issue of SeaFood Business >
