Despite record high prices of over USD 9.00 (EUR 8.10) for five- to eight-ounce snow crab clusters – marking the third straight year of prices over USD 8.00 (EUR 7.20) – the snow crab market’s demand doesn’t appear to be slowing, a company executive said as a panelist at the Global Seafood Market Conference.
Globally, supplies of snow crab have remained steady over the past decade, consistently sitting at an estimated 90,000 to 100,000 metric tons. The supply, the executive said, is remaining steady into 2020 and a 23 percent increase in the Alaskan quota has helped bolster supplies.
“We see the market as being very steady, very stable,” the executive said.
One factor that could affect the market at its onset is a potential lack of larger-sized crab in the Alaskan fishery, and whether that fishing would continue long enough to overlap with the Canadian snow crab fishery.
Larger size may be lacking in Alaska, he added, due to a large younger year class with lower biomass, likely leading to more three- to five-ounce clusters coming out of the fishery. The larger, eight-ounce sizes demanded by the market may have to wait until the Canadian season.
“I think those larger size that are demanded by the market will have to wait for the Canadian season, and just historically that just depends on ice conditions,” the executive said. “We might actually see Quebec opening up in March, and other parts of Canada opening up in early April.”
If Alaska’s fishery does go later than usual thanks to the large quota, it could “soften the Canadian market at the onset” as the two fisheries overlap in March and April.
“There’s also the potential that you could have Alaska and Canada packing simultaneously,” the executive said.
The prices, he added, are also being impacted by the high cost of business in the Alaskan market.
“There’s been a lot of rapid cost escalation,” he said. “Labor is escalating very dramatically, and of course it’s a dangerous occupation, it’s a dangerous harvest … it’s harder and harder to run those operations in a lean and efficient manner.”
Despite the high prices, retail promotions of snow crab continue to dramatically outpace those of king and Dungeness crab. Snow crab promotions alone were nearly double that of the king and Dungeness crab promotions combined in 2019.
“This is probably the most important slide,” the executive said of a graph showing the huge number of retail promotions for snow crab. “That first set of bars on the far left side, that really shows that retail continued to promote snow crab even with the pricing structure that we had in 2019.”
Photo courtesy of Nishihama/Shutterstock
