Our food service and restaurant customers need our help now more than ever and the retail partners around the country are receiving offers (of support) from producers and farmers around the country.” “But this is really an opportunity to separate ourselves as leaders and true partners for our best customers around the country. “The competitive landscape is greater now than I’ve experienced in my career in this business,” says Tyson Yeck, Pacific Seafood vice-president of sales. In grocery stores, while retail sales increased, so did competition as other seafood distributors also redirected toward the retail market the products that would have gone to restaurants. “It was pretty monumental – something we’d considered for years – but we were able to marshal the resources and make it happen relatively overnight. “We built the capability, we got our operations up and our distribution locations ready to fulfill these types of orders and did that in a matter of weeks,” says Heuffner. It established its own e-commerce platform and started selling fresh and frozen product directly to US consumers. The business-to-business distributor had to switch gears if it was to continue paying its fishermen and keep its aquaculture operations running. What weighs on the company’s operations and bottom line are the costs involved in implementing new safety measures and in expanding its workforce so it could schedule shifts further apart. “That doesn’t make up for the decline in restaurant sales, but it helps.”īritish Columbia-based processor Brown’s Bay Packing is somewhat isolated from much of the market impact because its role is in the very early part of the supply chain of Cermaq and Grieg Seafood. “Retail sales are stable and, in some cases, actually increasing as families are looking for healthy meals to cook at home and new meal ideas,” says Shawn Hall, spokesperson for the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association (BCSFA). With the restaurant and catering markets mostly closed, aquaculture producers have shifted some products that were destined for those markets toward retail, which requires additional processing. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected aquaculture like any other but there’s one industry sector that’s seeing business go up: seafood processing.
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