David is making waves
Shetlander hopes salt cod business will become even more successful
AS A young boy, David Polson spent many an hour at sea fishing and salting fish with his father.
Now the 44-year-old, from Shetland, is at the helm of a thriving salt cod business, while also holding down a day job with Johnson Marine.
Here, David tells us about his working life as owner of Thule Ventus, which he has been running since 2016.
Can you tell us about Thule Ventus and your products?
We sell salt cod, also known as bacalhau or bacalao. I use my lifelong understanding of traditional salting techniques to skin, fillet and portion sustainably caught cod landed by boat at Lerwick and Scalloway fish markets.
The process takes up to two months and the resulting Thule Ventus salted cod packs provide the names and Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) numbers of the vessels that caught the fish in each box.
The product is Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) accredited. We are also looking to launch fish cakes, croquettes and brandade de morue pate this year.
What’s the business’s journey been like so far?
It’s been a lot of hard work and getting to this point wouldn’t have been possible without funding from the Maritime Fisheries Fund, who gave me 50 per cent funding (£37,000) to design a website, source packaging, and brand my product before taking the salted cod to market in June last year.
Thanks to that work, we are stocked by 19 retailers across the UK, including award-winning Walter Purkis & Sons in London, and our taster packs are on the selves of Whole Foods’ seven UK stores. Where did the idea come from? I’d dipped my toe into the market 10 years ago but the internet wasn’t what it is now and the market wasn’t ready. Now, with the explosion of the foodie phenomenon, and the fact people are more willing to try different foods, particularly ones with provenance, I decided to really give it a go.
What’s it like juggling a business with another job?
Difficult, long hours, rewarding, complementary – the emotions and pressures vary from day to day.
What sort of training/qualifications did you need?
I’d grown up salting fish with my father. He would take me out to sea in a traditional 17ft wooden vessel that we rowed with just four oars. I worked the hand lines and set lines for skate, pollock, mackerel, haddock and cod.
From our catch, we’d then set some fresh fish aside for tea, salting the remainder. I’ve carried on the tradition, while working for the island ferries for 20 years, salting fish on board for meals. What’s a typical day like? The business is still part-time so, after tea, I usually spend an hour or so working with promotion, sales, and emails. I then put my little girls to bed, then head back to box fish late in to the evening.
The weekends tend to revolve around family and fish. As a fledgling business, no two days are the same. Favourite part of the job? Discovering new ways of working with the fish, developing the product, and doing things the way they would have been done hundreds of years ago.
Highs and lows of having your own business?
The highs and lows are greater than I expected. However, the general direction of travel is good and the lows are fewer than the highs. The freedom and ability to decide your own direction is fantastic.
What help and advice did you receive along the way?
I went to Business Gateway reasonably early on, as it seemed the logical thing to do.
Their general advice and connections linked me to the Fisheries Fund, which provided the additional finance I needed to produce packaging and tell my story in a way that would appeal to my target market.
Once that was all in place, I took to Twitter and secured many of my stockists, and caught the attention of Whole Foods through my persistence on social media. Future plans? Our fish should be viewed as being like the finest single malt whisky of the salt cod world, and the Holy Grail for my company is to crack the Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian and American markets, where lots of salt cod is consumed.
If I could capture just a 10th of one per cent of the Portuguese market, I’d be laughing.
That will take time so, for now, I’m concentrating on spreading the word throughout the UK.
I hope to be at the stage whereby I abandon the three containers and build my own manufacturing unit, which would allow me to create jobs, within the next three years.