High-end artisan seafood products were on display at a fine foods show in Paris this weekend, with “home-grown” caviar and innovative packaging for canned mussels among a raft of new products.
The biannual Salon Saveurs exposition aims to provide smaller, largely French producers who promote quality raw ingredients to market their range of products directly to the consumer.
For this show, the organizers drummed a “sustainable gastronomy” message, suggesting that artisan producers with their invariably short supply chains are particularly apt to answer growing consumer demand for sustainable food products.
French farmed caviar producer Caviar de France exhibited at the show with a range of products, including its Caviar Diva, which contains no preservatives and possesses a more subtle taste than the classic Caviar Ebene, and its Caviar de Bassin, tagged as a “fresh caviar ideal for a chic aperitif.”
A Caviar de France spokesperson told SeafoodSource that the company’s production now reaches about 1,000 meric tons a year. The company is based in western France near the Arcachon basin.
Sending the sustainability signal, French smoked salmon producer Patrick Chauchard, owner of the Fumage Artisanal d’Arzon, handed out samples of his product. Sourced from Scotland’s Label Rouge production, the salmon is initially salted by hand with Brittany’s celebrated sel de Guerande and then left for about eight hours. The fish is then smoked over beech wood for 12 hours, an “essential” stage that gives the salmon its taste.
Tapping into the resilient market for light snacks to accompany drinks, or “aperitifs” as they are known in France, French condiments producer Mille et Une Huiles this year launched Mussels in Olive Oil, presented in a smart, slim round tin and retailing for EUR 8.90. The launch joins the firm’s canned seafood range that includes mini-sardines (EUR 6.80 at retail), launched in 2008, and small smoked mackerel (EUR 7 at retail), all presented in the sophisticated, round-canned packaging.
“We launched the seafood canned products, available in fine food shops and online, in order to target the market for aperitifs,” Mille et Une Huiles spokesperson Catherine Gilbert-Dijos told SeafoodSource. “We’re also an oil firm, and these products are bathed in oil.”
Processing and packaging for all of its seafood products is conducted in Spain, she added.
High-end tinned sardine firm La Quiberonnaise, the last cannery at the port of Quiberon in northwestern France, promoted its artisan seafood at the show. The firm, which also cans mackerel, tuna and smoked oysters, claimed that since 1921 it has been preparing tinned sardines the same way: “With olive oil, peanut oil, spices, lemon and white wine.”
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