Cooked Irish brown crab, North Korean geoduck, Icelandic sea cucumber, and Vietnamese grouper are all being given a promotional push by Shanghai Quangeng Trading Co. in the run-up to Chinese New Year.
The holiday, which falls in January this year, historically represents one of the best-selling periods of the year for seafood in China.
Shanghai Quangeng Trading Co., which distributes imported seafood through its national network of stores and through its own online shop, signed Chinese actor and director Shen Teng to promote its Top Crab [Xie Zhuang Yuan] the brand.
Set up in 2009, Quangeng specializes in gift boxes and cards varying in price from CNY 498 (USD 71.48, EUR 64.11) to CNY 4,698 (USD 674.29, EUR 604.85), based on the selection of seafood in the box.
Signing up Shen Teng appears to be a move aimed at the annual New Year spending spree in China. The actor is popular for his sketches on China Central TV’s annual New Year Eve gala program, one of the most-watched shows on Chinese television. Other imported species being sold by Quangeng include “French silver cod,” U.S. scallops and “wild” king prawns from Vietnam.
Chinese seafood imports tend to spike towards the end of the year, when distributors bulk up warehouses in anticipation of the New Year spend. Exotic imported species have become a key sales strategy of firms like Quangeng, with the role once occupied by salmon – now largely mainstream –increasingly being allotted to products like geoduck from North Korea and product from Iceland, which is seen as a top source of high-quality seafood.
The logistics of bringing live seafood into China have gotten easier in recent years, and with the recent opening of a huge shipping hub at Xi’an Airport, bringing live and frozen seafood into China’s hinterlands has gotten even easier. Xi’an is the biggest city in northwestern China and one of China’s fastest-growing metropolises. The airport, which is served by 13 international routes, claims its new storage facility is the biggest holding place of its kind for live seafood in the country.
A recent ceremony and media tour at the airport showcased the tanks and product from eight countries, including Canadian lobster and British brown crab.
Photo courtesy of Top Crab
