Mazzetta Co.’s roll-out of its Oishii Shrimp brand is going as well as the company had hoped when it pressed the launch button in advance of Seafood Expo North America last March, according to Joe Chekouras, the company’s vice president of operations.
Oishii shrimp is grown in Thailand by Mazzetta’s partner in the endeavor, CP Foods, and transported live from pond to processing facility. In its marketing, Mazzetta asserts its shrimp go “from swimming to frozen within four hours.”
“We definitely had an initial bang of interest right out of the gate,” Chekouras told SeafoodSource at the Global Seafood Market Conference in Orlando, Florida, U.S.A. on 22 January. “Quite honestly, one of the biggest challenges has been keeping up with supply, specially with larger sizes more in demand.”
Mazzetta Co. has spent the past year working to get customers engaged with the brand and “telling them the Oishii story,” Chekouras said.
“We’ve had good traction with that because think customers want to hear about new and innovative ideas in the seafood industry, especially when it comes to shrimp, which hasn’t seen a lot of innovation in production for a while,” he said.
The Highland Park, Illinois, U.S.A.-based company sent its entire marketing team to Thailand to sit down with their counterparts working in production at CP Foods. After learning about the particulars of what goes into producing Oishii shrimp, the marketing crew took video, including in-person interviews with the producers, as featured content for the brand’s own website, Oishii.com.
The media crew also did additional interviews with corporate chefs who cook with Oishii shrimp, Chekouras said.
“One after another, in testimonials, they said they found it to be a higher-end shrimp in terms of tasting and texture especially, and the visual appeal of the shrimp is something we’ve heard a lot of positive comments about. It’s a bright orange color of shrimp compared to regular commodity shrimp,” he said. “Customers who tried it have stayed with it.”
Oishii sells at a premium to conventional farmed shrimp, Chekouras said, but cheaper than wild-caught U.S. Gulf of Mexico shrimp. Chekouras called that the brand’s pricing “comfort zone.”
“To get the branding right, we wanted to make it stand alone as something different, and that has worked,” he said. “So far, we like exactly where we are in the market. It’s an upper-end, higher-quality product. We feel like we’re actually competing against the wild shrimp or the Gulf shrimp in the marketplace.”
Given its initial success with Oishii, Chekouras said Mazzetta’s will stay the course with the brand.
“The plan is to keep moving forward as we have been. The feedback we’ve received has been such that we want to continue the way we’re going, because we’ve seen an ongoing upward trend,” he said.
The one alteration to the brand Mazzetta is making is expanding its sizing choice, and at some point in the near-future, the company will be launching a cooked item under the Oishii brand, Chekouras said.
Photo courtesy of Cliff White/SeafoodSource
