Tom Mazzetta is the founder and CEO of Highland Park, Illinois, U.S.A-based Mazzetta Company, which is one of the largest importers and producers of shrimp, mussels, lobsters, crab, and finfish in the United States, producing more than 100 million pounds of finished seafood products annually. Mazzetta spoke with SeafoodSource about the story behind Oishii, Mazzetta’s newly-launched line of premium shrimp.
SeafoodSource: How did Oishii come about?
Mazzetta: We started working on the idea a number of years ago with our partner CP Foods [Bangkok, Thailand-based Charoen Pokphand Foods]. Our discussions were centered around the fact that almost every commodity arrives at the factory live. We started asking ourselves how we could do something new and different in the shrimp industry, and we arrived at the idea of bringing shrimp to the factory live, like you would do with poultry or beef. All our Oishii shrimp arrive at the factory live and are processed live.
SeafoodSource: What is Oishii shrimp’s point of differentiation in the marketplace?
Mazzetta: Shrimp today, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s taken from farm ponds, put into barrels, put on ice, then transported to a depot or distribution center, then put onto trucks, sometimes immediately, transported to processing plant, so they sit on ice, so a majority of the time shrimp are sitting on ice. But sometimes, they’re just sitting in water, waiting for hours before they’re processed. And lots of wild shrimp have the same problem – they sit on a boat on ice for periods of time, or sit in nets for a period of time, and that soak might result in a different texture and taste than farmed shrimp.
For Oishii shrimp, we don’t have the water pick-up like shrimp gets when it’s sitting in water dead. And because we don’t have any water-pick up, we get a better flavor and a firmer texture. The most striking difference is the color. You get a very vibrant color processing this way. Before it’s cooked, it has a shell that’s extremely dark in color, and once it’s cooked, the shrimp turns a very bright orange red color. U.S. consumers eat with their eyes, so color is very important. And you definitely taste the difference.
SeafoodSource: How important was your partnership with CP Foods in developing Oishii shrimp?
Mazzetta: Discussions basically started around the question of how we could make shrimp better today than the commodity shrimp that’s oversoaked in the market. That discussion took place years ago, and evolved as CP Foods developed a process to grow vannamei shrimp to a larger size without being more disease-prone. Thailand suffered through a bad outbreak of white-spot disease six to seven years ago. In response, CP Foods developed high-bred shrimp that basically stopped this disease, and that led them to figure out how to develop vannamei to larger sizes. The growth cycle takes four to five months, and that makes this a premium product. As for size, close to 70 percent is under 15, and the balance is 16-20. It’s all farmed in lined ponds – it’s basically like having our own laboratory, it’s very sophisticated farming, not the regular type of farming done around the world.
SeafoodSource: What were the primary difficulties in figuring out how to transport massive amounts of live shrimp to a processing facility?
Mazzetta: First of all, there’s the aeration of the truck. There’s hoses all over the place. Then there was the pure cost of moving the shrimp. You’re moving less shrimp because moving them in water. A typical load of shrimp might have 10,000 pounds, while our aerated trucks might carry 3,000 pounds at most. You’re basically hauling a lot of water. But for our processing facilities being so close to our farms, we can do more trips with our trucks, keep going back and forth. The biggest thing is that we had to have all our farms in close proximity to factory. Normally farms are eight hours or more from the factory. These farms are within a half-hour to 45 minutes from the factory. All the shrimp arrive in aerated barrels, like an aquarium, and taken from those barrels into hoppers and transferred right into the factory.
SeafoodSource: Do you have any special procedures for processing the shrimp? Are you doing anything differently than you had previously?
Mazzetta: The processing is basically still the same, they go through their ice bath, cleansing bath, and everything from there on follows our normal procedures.
SeafoodSource: Why Oishii as a name?
Mazzetta: It means “delicious” in Japanese. For shrimp, you probably could never call something sushi-quality, but the fact that the product is arriving live and processed live, you get all the unmatched flavor and taste profiles – it’s as near to sushi-quality as you can get without calling it sushi grade. So there’s a reference to that Japanese idea of fresheness.
SeafoodSource: How important is Oishii’s all-natural designation?
Mazzetta: We’re not doing any type of preservatives, antibiotics, no soaking, chemicals, hormones phosophates. It’s a Chef’s Selection-type product, even to point of calling out on the bag that you might want to add salt in the preparation of this product because it’s so literally what we would call pure. Its base freshness allows the cook or the chef to do whatever they want with it.
As for consumers, they’re more interested in all-natural products, especially regarding imports coming into the U.S. You hear all the negative publicity about imports, and it’s an important part of our strategy to show consumers we’re concerned about that also.
SeafoodSource: Is the product for both foodservice and retail?
Mazzetta: Yes, it’s for both foodservice and retail. It’s now available nationwide.
SeafoodSource: What percentage of Mazzetta’s business is shrimp?
Mazzetta: In terms of both dollars and poundage, it’s a little over 50 percent.
SeafoodSource: How will you be marketing the Oishii brand?
Mazzetta: We’ve actually been putting it into the market in our branded products for well over a year now as an experiment, mainly into retail. Some companies that have purchased this never realized they were getting it. But you could see the differences compared to competitors’ product, and we saw the differences in our customers’ responses. And as for strategy, we’ve got the message that Oishii is just a new method that basically brings a new production type to the shrimp field.
SeafoodSource: What is the production capacity for Oishii?
Mazzetta: Currently, all our production of Oishii [shrimp] is taking place in Thailand, but we have the potential to expand. Eventually, there will be production in other areas. CP Foods had the farms that were near the factories and then they redesigned the farming to meet Oishii’s specifications. In the future, we can adjust in terms of the volume – we can add more volume to these farms, to adjust to our sales in the future. There’s More capacity there. Not everyone in the world will be able to have Oishii shrimp, but its’ not a boutique item. There will be volume of Oishii shrimp.
SeafoodSource: How important are certifications like BAP? Is that more consumer-driven or internally?
Mazzetta: You can’t be in the shrimp business without having it. It’s the acceptable practice today. The whole point of Oishii for us was, how could we make shrimp better. Our goal as a company is make sure when someone eats seafood, they have a great experience. That will make sure they eat seafood again. Our goal is not to be the biggest, our goal is to be the best. Per capita consumption of shrimp went up last year again in the U.S., and want to make sure we’re upping that per capita every year. But the way seafood is running today, unless we start to get off our butts and making sure we do things correctly and more naturally, we’re all going to lose in the long run. We have to do things better.
SeafoodSource: Overall, do you think Oishii represents a step forward for the shrimp sector?
Mazzetta: At Mazzetta, we always want to know how we can make things better – not cheaper in quality but better. We want people who eat seafood to have a great experience every time they eat seafood. And we think Oishii provides that experience. As an industry, if don’t continue to work on making our products better, we’re all going to lose.
And at Mazzetta, we saw an opportunity with Oishii to be better than everybody else, and with how many years it took us to develop, it’s going to take other companies a very long time to develop Oishii shrimp [if they wanted to try].
Photo courtesy of Mazzetta Co.
