China has been a demand bright spot for German processing equipment producer BAADER, especially with tuna- and salmon-processing facilities.
“Demand has been pretty good in China for us,” BAADER Global Head of Marketing for Fish and Refiner Technology Karel Van Velthoven told SeafoodSource. “Tuna and salmon are two popular species with Chinese consumers. Our 100+ years of experience in automation across the species and across different processing steps gives us, of course, a good headstart whenever a specific fish segment scales up to a more industrialized level.”
China’s processing capabilities have ramped back up since the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic’s effects wore off, and Van Velthoven pointed to the growing popularity of Atlantic salmon in China as a primary driver of investments made by processors like BAADER.
“As an example, we are part of China’s first [recirculating aquaculture system] salmon plant,” Van Velthoven said, referring to Nordic Aqua’s facility on Gaotang Island in Ningbo on China’s east coast.
The Lübeck, Germany-based firm is supplying its BAADER 101 machine for stunning and bleeding fish at the facility and its BAADER 142 machine for automatic gutting, according to Van Velthoven.
Andreas Thorud, managing director of Nordic Aqua’s Ningbo operations, confirmed to SeafoodSource that his company stood by its plan to expand capacity from a current 8,000 metric tons (MT) at the facility to eventually reaching production of 20,000 MT of locally produced land-based Atlantic salmon, with BAADER technology essential to making that happen.
Van Velthoven also suggested that opportunities will continue to arise with species which are still growing in popularity in markets like China.
“[It] varies a bit depending on the industrialization level of the different species, as Asia still has a significant percentage of certain fish species that are not processed on an industrial scale,” he said.
China’s whitefish processing-for-export sector, meanwhile, has struggled recently, in part due to weaker demand among Western consumers. David Jiang, head of seafood sourcing firm Unibond, told SeafoodSource that one-third of the country’s processing capacity has idled this summer due to weaker export demand.
