At the 2023 Seafood Excellence Global awards, Vičiūnai Group took home both the Best Retail Product prize and the Innovation prize, adding to the company’s growing list of honors.
The company’s Black Sepia Dumplings with Shrimp and Thai Broth Filling earned the best retail award, while its “Kinziukas” Hot-Smoked Salmon with Cheese and Pine Nuts earned the innovation award.
It isn’t the first time that Vičiūnai has stood on the award stage for Best Retail Product. The company won the Seafood Excellence Global Best Retail Product award in 2019 at Seafood Expo Global in Brussels, Belgium, with its Surimi Noodles Wok Style. In 2018, it also won a special Seafood Excellence Global award for innovation with its Surimi Lasagne Sheets.
Prior to morphing into the Seafood Excellence Global Awards, the awards were known as the Prix d’Elite, which served as the expo’s premier competition program for 15 years. Vičiūnai was named a finalist for that award for 14 out of 15 years of the competition.
Vičiūnai Group Director Juan Guitart Fernandez told SeafoodSource during the 2023 Seafood Expo Global, which ran from 25 to 27 April in Barcelona, Spain, the awards are recognition of the company’s continuous commitment to innovation.
Vičiūnai’s main business is in surimi, which Fernandez said requires the company to be at the forefront of innovating new formats and products.
“The consumer and the clients are waiting for us, and we have to be a proactive company, a leader of surimi in the world,” he said. “We need to be proactive in our category.”
But serving many different markets presents a major challenge, according to Fernandez. Vičiūnai sells its products in more than 180 countries around the world, so “each consumer is different” and looking for different innovations.
That’s part of why the company always submits products to the Seafood Excellence Global awards – it always has new products to showcase, Fernandez said.
“It’s a way to present and to say to the market we are here, we continue pushing our business,” he said.
The company, like many others, continues to face challenges related to the ripple effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing inflation. As prices for raw materials increase, Fernandez said, customers are being squeezed across multiple categories.
“[What] the consumer is willing to pay for our products, it’s not infinite,” Fernandez said.
The company is hoping that prices begin to ebb, but its ability to weather inflation ties back to its innovations and robust research and development efforts, he said. New products can offer more value and appeal to consumers while recovering margins on price.
“It gives us more margin – more value to the market, more value to the consumers,” Fernandez said.
The core of the company’s sales, he added, continues to be its basic range of surimi products like surimi sticks, but the more-innovative products help boost recognition in the seafood space.
“The other products give us more presence in the market, to show the consumer that we are a leader of the market,” Fernandez said.
The war in Ukraine has also caused the Kaunas, Lithuania-based company problems. After Russia invaded, the company vowed to sell off its Russian business, but had not yet done so as of March 2023, according to Delfi, a Lithuanian news outlet. Vičiūnai announced it had short-list of five potential buyers in August 2022, but Vičiūnai Co-Owner Visvaldas Matijosaitis told LRT in April 2023 the process has been moving slower than expected. Vičiūnai is insisting its factory in Kaliningrad, Russia, remain operational and its supply of raw materials from Russia remain intact for several months following the sale.
Photo by Chris Chase/SeafoodSource
