Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based Trident Seafoods is aiming to break into new territory on restaurant menus with its Crispy Battered Sauceable Nuggets.
Trident Seafoods President Jeff Welbourn told SeafoodSource the new offering, which won a Seafood Excellence Award, is the product of the hard work of the company’s innovation team and is a way of differentiating its nuggets from existing seafood products.
“Going after other seafood is a zero-sum game,” Welbourn said. “We don’t have enough things that play like chicken, and this is something that is durable enough, it has resilience.”
The new item is designed to be used in foodservice applications and was formulated with saucing in mind. Importantly, Trident Seafoods worked to make it more durable compared to other battered frozen seafood items, and it can withstand longer hold times in sauces without getting soggy or unappealing, the company said.
Trident Seafoods Director of Corporate Research and Development Olga Semenovich told SeafoodSource a lot of the innovation was focused on making something truly different that could also be flavored in multiple ways when it gets to a restaurant.
“Our goal is to help bring wild Alaskan seafood to market in different ways, but you can’t just do it with flavor,” she said. “Flavor trends come and go, they’re short lived, so we were thinking about how to help creators have a variety of different applications out of just one product.”
Trident Seafoods was demonstrating those multiple applications during Seafood Expo North America. The company was offering samples of the sauceable nuggets throughout the event, constantly changing between flavorings like a Thai chili sauce or a Cajun dry rub to show off its versatility.
“This way, they can buy only one product but they can change it, they can change the flavor profile, they can change the seasoning, they can add a sauce,” Semenovich said.
Welbourn and Semenovich said the company did a lot of product testing to make sure that it was what restaurants were looking for, but achieving a robust item wasn’t easy.
“It’s difficult with fish, because fish has a lot of moisture inherently, which is difficult to keep inside it,” Semenovich said.
That internal moisture can ruin even more durable coatings, which limits seafood to food items that are served extremely fresh.
“That tether that seafood has, historically, has been very close,” Welbourn said.
That shortcoming was especially evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, where restaurants were forced to create take-out heavy menus that often left out seafood because it couldn’t hold up. Trident’s sauceable nuggets, however, can survive the takeout container – or a longer stand time in a busy restaurant.
“It checks a lot of boxes, because creating some distances between that prep time and the consumption time allows for versatility,” Welbourn said.
He added that the core goal at Trident is always to build the seafood industry’s market share as a means of bringing value back to the fishing grounds in Alaska which provide the company its raw materials.
“Our history and our foundation was built on commodities, the capture and stewardship of an incredible wild natural resource,” Welbourn said.
The sustainability of that fishery is about more than just ensuring the resource has robust stocks, it also means ensuring that the fishermen that rely on it can make a living economically.
“We have to build the value proposition for consumers through our business partners, and this is an item that absolutely does that,” Welbourn said.
