Traditionally, retailers selling shelf-stable seafood products have limited their offerings to simple, unflavored cans of fish – primarily tuna – lacking the innovation that other food categories have been able to achieve.
Research on what seafood consumers value, such as the 2023 FMI Power of Seafood report, continues to indicate U.S. seafood shoppers prioritize quality, price, sustainability, convenience, and health, but increasingly are searching for ingenuity as well.
According to the FMI report, sustainability in seafood products is important to 66 percent of seafood shoppers, and 69 percent claim nutrition and health as primary or important reasons to eat seafood. More U.S. consumers lack time to cook meals from scratch, making ready-to-eat options increasingly important for them.
By emphasizing sustainability and nutrition, seafood companies have started to take the steps needed to meet these consumer needs, and by updating their shelf-stable offerings with ready-to-eat meals that feature an intriguing array of flavored ingredients, they’ll find even more success, according to Henry Lovejoy, the president of EcoFish, a company that produces Henry and Lisa’s Natural Seafood and Freshé brands of shelf-stable seafood items.
“A lot of food categories have kept up with consumers’ tastes, except for canned fish,” Lovejoy said. “Until we launched Freshé Meals in 2018, it was still just canned fish. Even with high-quality canned fish – if you could find it – you still had to go to other parts of the store to make a meal with it, even if it was just a sandwich [you wanted].”
EcoFish, headquartered in Dover, New Hampshire, U.S.A, employs the European tradition of preserving seafood in tins, a process that avoids the use of preservatives and keeps seafood fresh for years, for its Freshé brand. The company has begun to use this process to create ready-to-eat tinned meals that use fish as a base, along with complementary ingredients such as vegetables, legumes, herbs, spices, and olive oil.
“That niche in the market was just sitting there for ready-to-eat, convenient, healthy seafood meals,” Lovejoy said. “There’s a reason why the majority of seafood is sold in restaurants; Consumers in the U.S. are largely uncomfortable preparing seafood at home.”
Freshé meals are tinned in Portugal and have a four-year shelf life without requiring refrigeration. The Freshé team worked with a chef in the U.S. state of Maine to develop global recipes, shooting for innovation in both format and flavor. About 3,500 stores feature Freshé products, and the company has also found success with digital sales.
The meals include three tuna-based flavors – Provence Nicoise, Aztec Ensalada, and Thai Sriracha – and two salmon-based flavors – Moroccan Tagine and Barcelona Escalivada. Ingredients used in the tins are locally sourced around the Iberian Peninsula, where the meals are packaged.
“Compared to European tinned seafood, canned fish in the U.S. has been pretty terrible over the last 50 years. Not surprisingly, consumers in the U.S. historically have a bad perception of what canned fish is, so we knew going into it there was going to be a lot of education required,” Lovejoy said.
Along with a focus on nutrition, Freshé focuses on sustainability and insists on obtaining certifications such as Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) credentials for all its products.
“You can make it easier for consumers with sustainable certification on labels. There are a lot of brands out there that throw the sustainability word around very loosely, but at the end of the day, it’s no different than organic produce. If it isn’t certified, it isn’t sustainable,” Lovejoy said. “Younger consumers are coming in and genuinely care about the future of the planet. So, the future is embracing credible certification bodies like the MSC and ASC, and it [involves] catering to the new consumers who want convenience, health, and global flavors.”
Neptune Snacks, a Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based seafood company that produces fish jerky as a shelf-stable seafood snack for consumers, has also recognized sustainability as a nonnegotiable aspect of production. The company’s offerings include sea salt, juniper, and spicy cajun flavored Pacific rockfish jerky, and sweet citrus ginger and cracked pepper flavored Alaskan pollock jerky. The latter product was a finalist for the 2022 Seafood Excellence Award in the retail category.
“Sustainable seafood has so much to offer consumers [as a] resource-efficient, carbon-efficient protein, but seafood as an industry is overdue for its reckoning, largely because the industry has been opaque for so long and because it is certainly the most complex food category to unpack,” Neptune Snacks Founder Nick Mendoza said. “One thing is certain: the flywheel is now turning, and there is no going back.”
According to Neptune’s website, 2.3 billion pounds – or 1 million metric tons – of seafood supply is wasted in the U.S. annually, and less than 0.5 percent of seafood is reliably traced. These are trends that Neptune Snacks and Freshé are looking to reverse.
Neptune Snacks sources its Alaska pollock and Pacific rockfish locally in Northwest U.S. coastal waters and uses historically undervalued fillets that may feature an imperfect or undersized shape or come from surplus catch to cut down on food waste. The jerky has a 12-month shelf life, and the company guarantees 100 percent source traceability.
“Shelf-stable is a virtually net-new opportunity for getting seafood into people’s carts, and I believe that Americans are ready to adopt these kinds of innovations,” Mendoza said.
Other brands have also started to catch on to what seafood consumers want, diversifying the seafood options from which shoppers can choose. Prime Shrimp, De Medici, and Handy Seafood are just a few additional companies offering products that are targeting the convenience market to meet consumer needs.
“Innovate or die,” Lovejoy said. “You need to make seafood easy and approachable. Everybody knows it’s healthy. That message is clear, but if it’s not in a format that’s convenient and delicious, consumers will go to another protein.”
Photo courtesy of EcoFish
