The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Can salted cod be king again?
Atlantic Canadian companies proving the potential in export markets
It’s a peculiar thing to see on any business website in Atlantic Canada.
The option to convert text to Portuguese.
But when your main product is salted fish — cod, haddock, hake and pollock — and your main retail buyers are in the Portuguese communities and restaurants throughout North and South America, and Europe, it’s crucial to speak the language of your customers.
Sea Star Seafoods Ltd. of Clark’s Harbour, Nova Scotia also includes a French option at www.seastarseafoods.com.
They also offer smoked salmon and mackerel products, said Howard Atkinson, general manager for the company.
But salted fish has been the main product of this rural business for more than three decades.
“It’s 90 percent of what we produce,” Atkinson told Saltwire.
That means steady employment in a small community, and in an industry that is mostly seasonal.
Atkinson said Sea Star Seafoods employs 100 people, year-round.
“We’re rather proud of that,” said company co-owner Adlai Cunningham.
While others turned to other species after the cod moratorium was announced in 1992, “We stuck to our roots, stuck to our guns and, as the competition (for cod) went away we diversified,” he told Saltwire.
Today the company started by Cunningham and his brother, Fenton, has grown from the original 800 sq. ft. property to more than 60,000 sq. ft. of storage and processing space.
And work stayed steady this year, even as the seafood industry in Atlantic Canada was taking a hit because of COVID-19.
In fact, at the start of the pandemic this company was a little busier than usual.
The products produced at Clark’s Harbour are sold through boutique stores catering to the Portuguese and Spanish communities south of the border.
As COVID-19 took hold, customers for whom salted fish is a diet staple began to stock up, said Quent Wickens, who heads up salt fish sales for the company.
Normally they operate one shift daily, working 9 a.m to 5 p.m.
For a while, that went to two shifts a day to meet increased demand as pandemic buying and stocking up became the norm.
“In the first two weeks of COVID, we actually saw a spike in sales. We didn’t see that coming,” Wickens said.
He’s traveled through the Eastern United States and beyond seeking out markets for Sea Star products.
He says finding buyers for salted fish isn’t that complicated.
“You see an area that has a Portuguese club or pub and that’s all it takes to get another pallet of salt fish sold,” he told Saltwire.
“We’ve developed and are supplying niche markets, and have customers that order up a pallet or more of salted fish regularly,” he said.
“If we think in Atlanta Canada we eat a lot of salt fish, we’re kidding ourselves,” he added. “This is a religion for the Portuguese.“
Still, there are challenges, chief among them finding cod. Sea Star gets some of its stock from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador, buying fresh frozen cod from suppliers like the Barry Group and Quin-sea.
Still, with low quotas and short fishing seasons in Atlantic Canada, the company can’t depend on regional cod supplies to feed a year-round operation.
“In Nova Scotia, there’s almost no codfish here and in Newfoundland and Labrador, it’s only from August to November. And we operate 12 months a year so we have to get raw material from Norway,” said Atkinson.
Sea Star is among just a handful of enterprises in the region producing traditional salted and dried cod for export.
Yet there’s a world of opportunity out there for salted fish products.
And right now Norway has a competitive advantage
For one, that country has an active cod fishery.
According to a press release from the Norwegian Seafood Council (NSC) last October, 2019 was set to be a recordbreaking year for Norwegian seafood, with export values reaching over $100 billion K (roughly $14 billion Canadian).
“So far this year, Norway has exported 19,200 tonnes of salted fish worth NOK 1.1 billion,” the NSC noted in its October press release. “This is a decrease of 22 percent, while the value fell by 12 percent or NOK 152 million from the same period last year. In September, Norway exported 998 tonnes of salted fish worth NOK 47 million. Volume fell by 17 percent, while export value fell by 19 percent or NOK 11 million. Portugal, Spain and Greece have been the most important markets so far this year.”
And according to Statistics Norway, in 2019 the fishing industry landed 327,648 tonnes of Atlantic Cod.
“One of their boats can catch In one month an amount of cod that’s equivalent to the cod quota currently available annually in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador,” said Atkinson. “They can ship container loads to customers.”