Boston lobster, perch, crab, and turbot featured in a bumper cooked meal trade for JD.com during the recent Chinese New Year festival.
The online retailer hired a Michelin-star chef, William Wu, to create a set of dinner menus offered as a special for the annual celebration, which took place in mid-February. Offered through JD.com's omnichannel supermarket SEVEN FRESH, the ready-to-cook meal gift boxes and meal packages included Boston lobsters, steamed fish, as well as cooked crabs.
Wu’s steamed perch (often referred to as bass) dish ranked customers’ favorite choice, followed by cooked Boston (North American) lobster, while the third-most popular was steamed turbot.
JD.com reported sales of Chinese New Year-themed meals were up 237 percent year-on-year, in large part due to COVID-19 related curbs on dining out. The higher sales suggest Chinese consumer interest in imported seafood remains high, despite Chinese Customs reporting it has discovered live COVID-19 on the packaging of various seafood imports.
New projections from the Chinese government also paint a rosy picture for seafood imports. This year’s annual Agriculture Ministry economic outlook conference projected a quick recovery in the country’s seafood imports post-COVID-19 crisis, projecting they will surpass 7.5 million metric tons (MT) by 2029.
The ministry predicted China’s seafood exports will remain flat at 4.9 million tons through 2029, while saying the total volume of seafood sold in China will hit 72.3 million MT in 2029. With the ministry predicting that domestic production will only cover 69.7 million MT of that total, there appears to be a widening space for seafood imports into the Chinese market.
One market that has already recovered somewhat from short-term disruptions caused by COVID-19 and the Sino-U.S. trade war is U.S. lobster. American exports of lobsters to China appear to have recovered in 2020 with trade up 49 percent year on year to USD 127 million (EUR 105 million), though still below the USD 147 million (EUR 122 million) worth of American lobsters shipped to China in 2018. In January 2020, China lifted a 25 percent tariff on U.S. lobster imports. As a result, shipments of Canadian lobsters into China – which had boomed while American lobsters faced the tariff – dropped 20 percent in 2020.
Photo courtesy of JD.com
