Premium brand secrets unveiled
Regional Director for Grieg Seafood’s Canadian operations Stewart Hawthorn told an audience during the Aquaculture Canada 2015 conference last week that the company’s venture into the premium farmed salmon market has been a success.
Their Skuna Bay farmed Atlantic salmon has already been featured at the Kentucky Derby and the US Open Tennis Tournament. Hawthorn also described how chefs at the James Beard Foundation in New York had visited Grieg’s farms on the west coast of Vancouver island and how they came away very impressed. Some of the required quality features of these “craft-raised” salmon are:
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Always at least 9 lbs (4 kg).
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Beautiful red gills.
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Thick, firm, meaty belly.
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Perfect silvery scales.
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Clear eyes.
- Pristine appearance - no cuts, scrapes, scars or lesions of any type.
The Skuna Bay salmon are also packaged and shipped in tamper-proof, recyclable and patented “Thermafresh” carton which has insulation qualities equal to or better than that of a regular Styrofoam box.
Hawthorn said that the amount of its production going to the Skuna Bay program is increasing from its current level of 6-10%, and this relatively low level is partly due to a low level of overall production last year. He said that Grieg is not necessarily doing things a lot better than other producers in the region, but rather taking advantage of the segmentation in the marketplace, where there is a demand for a premium product. “All salmon is good and good for you” he said.
The development of the Skuna Bay brand took a lot of research, Hawthorn said. In the end, the company realized that they had to connect the chefs with the fish, and to develop a compelling story around the way they produce these salmon. No chef gets to use their premium product unless they have visited the farms where the fish come from, and all the pictures of people on the Skuna Bay website are of First Nations and others that actually work on the Grieg farm sites.
And the company logo was based on an actual weathervane found in Friendly Cove in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island - where Captain James Cook arrived from Spain in 1778.
