Executives at New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.-based Prime Shrimp are on a mission to popularize at-home shrimp consumption across America by emphasizing their products’ convenience, high quality, and flavor.
Fresh off the launch of six frozen shrimp products 18 months ago, the shrimp processor and packager recently rolled out its newest flavor: New Orleans-style BBQ. The company is attempting to coax consumers who prioritize convenience away from meat and toward seafood.
“For years, shrimp has been America’s favorite seafood, consistently ranking as the seafood option with the highest consumption rates in the U.S. … yet shrimp consumption lags significantly behind beef and chicken consumption,” Prime Shrimp Commercial Manager Matt Rosenthal told SeafoodSource.
Americans eat, on average, 5 pounds of shrimp per capita annually – about 90 percent less than beef products. After analyzing the steep dropoff in consumption rates between meat and seafood, the Prime Shrimp team realized there was a “huge void and opportunity” in the retail market for products that address “real challenges preventing people from enjoying seafood at home,” Rosenthal said.
“For many, the mismatch can be attributed to a lack of familiarity with buying and cooking seafood at home,” Rosenthal said. “We strongly believe it is the responsibility of the seafood companies – that’s us – to offer new and exciting products that make cooking shrimp at home easy, fun, and rewarding.”
Prime Shrimp executives focused on creating a line of Cajun- and Creole-inspired flavors, including French Quarter alfredo, garlic herb butter, and the latest New Orleans-style BBQ for its sauced line. The new BBQ shrimp offering combines the tang of lemon butter and Worcestershire sauce with the spice of black pepper and chili flakes, Rosenthal said.
“As a fiercely local flavor – the best recipes of which are hotly contested amongst New Orleans natives – the New Orleans-style BBQ flavor holds a special place in our hearts,” Rosenthal said. “We spent months developing the perfect recipe. The result is truly a reflection of our company’s roots and the culinary culture we hold dear.”
The new flavor is available in half-pound packages – each containing two servings – online and at select stores across the Southeast U.S. for a suggested retail price of USD 9.99 (EUR 9.25). Rouses Markets, Central Market, Weaver Street Market, Food Giant, and select specialty stores carry the product.
Other Prime Shrimp offerings include its seasoned line, composed of Louisiana boil, lemon, and cracked pepper, and signature Cajun flavors.
“Prime Shrimp’s boil-in-bag cooking method eliminates the mess and guesswork, so any consumer can make home-cooked, restaurant-quality shrimp in less than 10 minutes,” Rosenthal said.
The company’s “Simply” line, which includes no sauce or seasoning, offers plain shrimp “as a direct alternative to traditional IQF [individually quick frozen] shrimp options,” the supplier said.
Prime Shrimp is a division of the Laitram Corporation, which is based in Harahan, Louisiana. The company was created in 1943, and its founder created the first automated shrimp peeler, which “truly revolutionized” the domestic shrimp sector, Rosenthal said.
One of its divisions, Laitram Machinery, pioneered high-performance shrimp-peeling equipment, steam cookers, and SMART Solutions, which is “an entirely new approach to shrimp grading,” the company says on its website. The automatically fed SMART Sorter scans every shrimp in a group, using laser-imaging and computer algorithms to inspect, grade, and sort at a rate of more than 45 shrimp per second.
Prime Shrimp is Laitram’s first foray into creating a consumer-packaged product.
“We started the Prime Shrimp project to address what we saw as a huge opportunity to improve the quality of farm-raised shrimp in particular,” Rosenthal said. “There are some obvious things about the way farm-raised products are typically handled and processed that we were excited to reimagine and rethink.”
To that end, Prime Shrimp sources antibiotic-free, Best Aquaculture Practices-certified products from “the top aquaculture operations in Ecuador,” Rosenthal said, declining to list specific suppliers.
“What makes us different from others who offer value-added shrimp products is that we import the product shell-on to peel and devein it in our domestic facility so we [can] maintain control of all steps of handling, treatment, flavoring, and packing,” Rosenthal said.
Photo courtesy of Prime Shrimp
