Dutch Seafood Company is expanding its shrimp-peeling capacity in Morocco by opening a second peeling center in Tangier, according to the company’s chief commercial officer, Wilbert Vedder.
The move is being made “to keep up with the growing demand on grey shrimp in the European market,” Vedder told SeafoodSource.
Unlike its main competitors in the sector, Ristic and Morubel, which are moving to more fully automate their peeling processes, Dutch Seafood Company continues to primarily rely on manual labor to peel its shrimp by hand. The new plant is scheduled to open in fall of this year and will employ 1,500 workers, Vedder said.
Dutch Company already operates a larger peeling plant in Tangier it built in 2015 for EUR 15 million (USD 16.9 million). In addition, it updated its plant in Volendam, The Netherlands to a larger, more modern facility in 2018. The new 5,506-square-meter shrimp processing and packaging facility has a capacity of 20,000 metric tons.
In 2016, Maiko van der Meer, who was then CEO of Klaas Puul, which became Dutch Seafood Company in June 2018 after it merged with salmon smoker Foppen, told SeafoodSource the company had committed to hand-peeling because it resulted in a better end-product.
“The human hand is more effective and efficient at peeling small North Sea shrimps than machines are, and by doing hand-peeled, you get more yield and better quality. We think there’s only a selective part of the market that can go to machine-peeled. Hand-peeled shrimp is preferred by consumers and results in cheaper and better-quality shrimp, year-round,” he said.
In addition to continuing to serve the demand for shrimp in Europe, Dutch Seafood Company announced its intentions to push harder for a larger slice of the U.S. market for its shrimp and smoked salmon, Vedder told SeafoodSource in March at the 2019 Seafood Expo North America in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
