ShrimpTails spoke to Fan Xubing, head of Beijing-based Seabridge Marketing, – the company in charge of Canada’s promotion of Northern prawn within China. In the conversation, he revealed how, in the last decade, the Chinese market has warmed up considerably to the consumption of coldwater shrimp, particularly northern prawn.
Some thirteen years ago, the Chinese hardly knew what northern prawn (P. borealis) was. Although some small volumes were being exported to northern China, northern prawn had neither brand nor name. As it was sold frozen in the wholesale market, the price and sales number of coldwater shrimp were suffering from the competition of lower-priced and larger warmwater farmed shrimp such as the Pacific white shrimp (L. vannamei).
However, imports of Canadian northern prawn into China have witnessed an enormous increase of 58 percent from 2007 to 2018, with a peak of 45,578 metric tons (MT) in 2017. In 2018, China imported a total of 45,547 MT of northern prawn, 60 percent of which was sourced from Canada and 20 percent from Greenland. Import prices for Northern prawn increased by a whopping 181 percent from USD 2.01 (EUR 1.81) per kg in 2007 to USD 5.64 (EUR 5.10) per kilogram in 2018.
“While Japan and Scandinavia are important long-standing customers, China has been our single largest market since Russia banned food imports from many Western countries,” Bruce Chapman of the Canadian Association of Prawn Producers (CAPP) said. In 2018, the members of the CAPP exported around 27,000 MT to China. Roughly two thirds of China’s total imports of northern prawn comes from Canadian suppliers.
The secret behind the Chinese new love
But what exactly was at the heart of this growth? According to Xubing, the increasing Chinese demand for Northern prawn is driven by the strong branding and the image of the product.
“We try to emphasize some key features of the Northern prawn through consumer education and marketing. First, the coldwater shrimp comes from the clean and cold waters of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Second, it is cooked on board, and is safe and ready to eat. Third, since it’s a wild product, it is very nutritious and fresh,” he said. It wasn’t love at first sight for the Chinese, but skilled branding and targeted marketing did the trick.
E-commerce and retail have also played an important role in widening the Chinese access to Northern prawn (read more about this in the article The Chinese Premium Shrimp Market: Food is Heaven in the December 2018 issue of ShrimpTails). A decade ago, Northern prawn was usually delivered to Chinese end users in 5 kilogram boxes, cooked whole and frozen. Now, however, Xubing notes that more importers repack them into packages of 500 grams to 1 kilogram, or reprocess them further into marinated products or dumplings, to be sold in supermarkets and by smaller retailers and online selling platforms. Some of the major e-commerce platforms and retail chains include JD, Tmall and Suning.
As landing volumes from Canada are directly affected by maximum quotas or a Total Allowable Catch (TAC), Xubing says that imports of Canadian Northern prawn may vary from year to year, but have overall been relatively stable. Any variability in supply volumes are currently complemented by supplies from the Barents Sea or from West Greenland.
Photo courtesy of Shrimptails
