The COVID-19 pandemic’s drastic impact on foodservice may have severely hampered sales in that category, but retail saw a massive uptick – and higher-end seafood was the biggest winner.
Seafood overall managed to eke out impressive gains in sales thanks to the strong performance of seafood in retail, with frozen seafood seeing a significant jump. But it was the highest-end items that saw the largest uptick, with big-ticket items like lobster, crab, and barramundi gaining the most ground, according to data shared during a panel that is part of the National Fisheries Institute’s Global Seafood Marketing Conference (GSMC) webinar series. SeafoodSource is providing exclusive coverage of the GSMC Webinar series, which will be providing comprehensive market content throughout 2021.
“In retail, crab jumped up 87 percent, lobster 87 percent,” Performance Food Group Vice President of Procurement Mike Seidel said during the panel. “If you look at that, they’re pretty pricey ticket items.”
For years, a regular conversation at GSMC has been the difficulty of getting customers to purchase certain seafood items at retail, largely due to the fear that they would prepare it improperly.
“We’ve talked about it for years that people don’t buy seafood because they don’t know how to cook it,” Publix Seafood Category Manager Guy Pizzuti said during the panel. “Well about March 12, everybody seemed to figure it out.”
Panelists speculated that the pandemic taking away foodservice as an option resulted in more customers trying to cook seafood at home in order to continue eating the food items they craved.
Pizzuti said at Publix, the seafood category saw significant double-digit percentage increases in sales, mirroring the nationwide trend. But overall, the higher-end items saw the biggest gains, even within specific seafood types.
For example, he said scallops of larger sizes saw the largest sales increases, with a large portion of the sales gains happening in 10-20 scallops. Nationally, NPD Supply Track data indicates that scallops saw a 64 percent uptick in retail sales overall.
Overall, frozen seafood saw huge gains in 2020. Data indicates that frozen seafood was a USD 6.9 billion (EUR 5.6 billion) category, up 35 percent, or USD 1.8 billion (EUR 1.4 billion), from 2019. That growth outpaced the frozen department as a whole, which finished 2020 with 21 percent gains.
Pizzuti said a significant portion of those seafood sales went to new customers, that had never purchased seafood before. While loyal customers increased the amount of money they were spending on seafood, over a quarter of the additional sales went to people that hadn’t bought seafood at a Publix before the pandemic, Pizzuti said.
“They reported in our surveys that they had never bought seafood from Publix before,” he said.
Photo courtesy of iinspiration/Shutterstock
