While the frozen pollock market remains steady following the opening of the fishing season in Alaska, prices for fresh East Coast pollock are up drastically as catches are well below what was expected.
“The fresh market is way up, supplies are off, their catches are horrible, but it hasn’t really gone over to the frozen side yet,” says a buyer for one foodservice company that provides fish for several thousand restaurants. “The price is up by about 65 percent, whole fresh fish is about USD 3.75 a pound.”
Despite the high fresh prices at the start of 2013, buyers are still in the market, as pollock, hake and haddock remain less expensive than prices for fresh cod, which the buyer says are “up ridiculously.”
Fresh pollock fillets remain quite pricey, with reports from the second week of January showing f.o.b. prices of around USD 5.50 a pound in New England and USD 6 at New York’s Fulton Market.
“All the new restaurants that are opening, the family-friendly, kind of middle-of-the-lane restaurants, everybody is trying to go fresh, they want to put it on the menu, so all the mid- to lower-priced fish are becoming more prevalent,” the buyer says. “In New England, pollock and cod has always sold. Once you get south of Connecticut or even Rhode Island, you couldn’t sell hake or pollock, it was all cod, cod, cod, cod, cod. Now cod prices are so high that if you want to have a USD 15.95 price point for an entrée, you can’t use fresh cod anymore. So there’s been a push for pollock and hake and haddock down in this market.”
Restaurants begrudgingly made the switch from cod to pollock and other groundfish, but now are pleased with the change since it costs about USD 3 to plate a 6-ounce pollock entrée, compared to around USD 8 for cod. “As long as it’s good fresh fish, it’s interchangeable from a usage standpoint and you get the same result,” the buyer says. “Today, if you go over USD 20 on your entrée at a family-friendly restaurant, you’re overpriced and nobody is coming. So if you have a 6-ounce center-of-the-plate portion size, and you can make it work for USD 3 for your portion cost, you can have a USD 16.95 entrée.”
Prices for once-frozen, skinless and boneless Alaska pollock were between USD 2.25 and USD 2.50 a pound, while twice-frozen Alaskan product processed in China was selling for about USD 1.35 a pound.
The buyer says that’s where he expected frozen prices to be at this part of the season. “The frozen market is pretty steady,” he says. “As far as the frozen, it’s wherever the catch is on the Pacific side,” meaning Russia or Alaska. “I buy that as a commodity item, so most of the time I don't even know the country of origin. But the market itself has been steady.”
Regulators set Alaska’s 2013 pollock catch for the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands at 1.27 million metric tons (MT), up from 1.22 million MT in 2012. The pollock quota for the Gulf of Alaska is 121,046 MT, up about 5,000 MT. Whether those total amounts are caught depends on rules limiting vessels catching pollock to taking no more than 25,000 king salmon as bycatch in the central and western Gulf of Alaska.
