Vejle, Denmark-based Food With You has gotten very good at serving the Scandinavian market with what it wants – smoked salmon.
Food With You sells fresh, chilled, and frozen products all over Europe, but in recent years, it has come to focus on the Scandinavian market, and particularly on developing, marketing, and selling a variety of smoked salmon products there.
“That's our domestic market. When we formed the company 13 years, ago, that was where we got our start, and now we’ve gained experience there and we feel like we know it better than anyone,” Food With You Sales and Purchasing Manager Adel Ajanovic told SeafoodSource at the 2022 Seafood Expo Global in Barcelona, Spain on 28 April. “Smoked salmon is a complicated product, and we think we put together a quite competitive package between quality, flavor, and price.”
Ajanovic said Food With You is one of the top-three smoked salmon distributors in Denmark and has a significant footprint in Sweden and Norway. It also has a sales presence in Germany, the rest of Europe, and Japan, he said. Through in-house production and affiliations with partner firms, Food with You runs smokehouses in Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Germany.
“Where it is produced depends on what kind of approach we are taking with the product. Each facility has its own specialty and we have partners and consultants who can make a wide variety of products,” Ajanovic said. “Because of that flexibility, we are able to keep our products interesting for our clients.”
But Ajanovic said his company decided to focus on the Scandinavian market in recent years.
“In Norway and Sweden, they like their smoked fish. And our raw materials [are] coming primarily from Norway so that makes it a domestic product for them, and we’ve sought to capitalize on that by mastering the all-traditional Scandinavian way of smoking salmon. We realized we needed to be authentic and so we really tried to get traditional with what we were doing.”
That has paid off to some extent as rapidly rising salmon prices have put extreme pressure on Europe’s smoked salmon market, Ajanovic said.
“Rising salmon prices are creating a difficult situation because there's a lot of noise on the market right now,” he said. “Everybody expecting prices to fall but it seems to me the price will just continue on the same level or higher level. So it's difficult to find the right I'd say the right path to react to this situation, but at least we have a recognized name, brand, and reputation in Scandinavia that customers appreciate.”
Food With You is facing higher prices for everything from its raw materials, to its packaging, to its energy prices, Ajanovic said. He said the company’s leadership team has had difficult conversations about raising prices.
“Everybody's dealing with inflation and everyone is increasing prices. Privately, our customers expect prices to go up, but it’s still a difficult decision of how much we should increase [prices], if it's 20 percent, 30 percent, or even 50 percent,” he said.
With those higher prices, Food With You is facing the harsh reality that some customers have ceased buying, Ajanovic said.
“Everybody's in this waiting situation. They’re saying, ‘Let's just see how things will be in one week, two weeks, because the situation seems to be so dynamic even week-to-week.’ But that’s the reality of the times we are living in right now,” he said.
Ajanovic said his talks with clients now are of a different tone and tenor than they ever have been as a result of the inflation and price hikes.
“I’m saying, ‘Okay, guys, listen. If you want us to be supplied in one year, you need to help us now because the situation right now is it's terrible for everyone,’” he said. “We are everything to try to optimize the support we provide our clients. Our biggest clients are retail chains. In the previous six months, we were working with them to do creative things with our products, create new offerings. Now it’s all the opposite – they are just asking us to get them cheap products. So we are talking about downsizing their products to maintain this psychological pricing level out in the shop.”
Ajanovic said Food With You’s staff is maintaining a positive attitude, despite the difficulties.
“It's part of part of the game, you know?” he said. “The way we’re trying to look at it is, there are possibilities and opportunities in the market, because everybody's struggling. That could open some new doors.”
Photo courtesy of Cliff White/SeafoodSource
