Spanish tuna company Balfegó is preparing to inaugurate a new processing and office facility in Spain in time for the 2025 Seafood Expo Global, taking place this year in Barcelona, Spain, from 6 to 8 May.
Balfegó catches bluefin tuna in May and June each year and then ranches the fish in farms off the coast of L'Ametlla, Spain. The company then feeds its fish a specific diet depending on customers’ needs and harvests them using the Japanese ikejime method to produce a high-end product.
Balfegó Marketing Manager Laia Ortiz Radua told SeafoodSource during Seafood Expo North America – which ran from 16 to 18 March in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. – that the company is now poised to open a new facility in Spain that will allow it to accelerate its expansion after years of being hampered by space constraints.
“We are going to expand the brand, not just in terms of selling more tuna but in terms of creating new products. We are going to present everything on 5 May,” Radua said.
Radua said the company has been working in provisional facilities for multiple years. Its main facility was hit by a fire that destroyed the plant in 2018, and since then, it has been working to avoid investing in what was always supposed to be a provisional facility.
“We didn’t want to invest a lot of money there,” Radua said.
Not investing in that facility has been difficult as Balfegó has been growing steadily. Radua said when she first started roughly six years ago, the company was made up of roughly 80 employees. Now, it employs over 200, and in the last year alone, it has hired 40 more people.
“So, the company was growing a lot, and we haven’t had enough space to grow at the same time,” Radua said. “So, you have to have more people cutting the tuna or more people preparing the boxes, but you don’t have enough space.”
That lack of space has had other consequences for the company aside from hampering growth. It also ...
