Farm-fresh fish
These are not good times for customer confidence in animal protein on the restaurant menu. Beef has only just recovered from the sales collapse of BSE, and lamb prices are higher than ever through the depletion of the UK flock following foot-and-mouth. Chicken constantly flirts with controversy and health scares and, while pork has so far escaped any major food scare and is cheap, it's the least-served of the three main red meats.
That should present an open door to fish, but fish has its own crises. Salmon is cheap to buy, but now carries little excitement and has been dogged with health scares in the past few years through the use of antibiotics in feed and pesticides to rid the fish of sea lice.
The salmon producers have put on a brave face, saying that negative press reports were exaggerated and sales were only marginally affected, but wholesale merchants see a different picture. Chris Neve, a partner in one of the North of England's biggest catering fish suppliers, C&G Neve of Fleetwood, Lancashire, says salmon sales have been hit hard. "As soon as the salmon scare hit the headlines there was a 30% drop in sales into restaurants almost overnight," he says. "That has to reflect what customers were ordering off the menu. Salmon sales have recovered in the past couple of weeks, but are still about 25% down on this time last year."
Salmon is not the only favoured restaurant fish to be the subject of a health alert. Oceanic roaming species such as tuna and swordfish ingest heavy metals from the polluted oceans and carry a warning for vulnerable groups such as the young and pregnant women.
North Atlantic cold-water prawns caught in the wild continue to have a clean bill of health, but farmed tiger prawns from South-east Asia have had intermittent import bans put on them because of toxin levels above EU limits.
And while there is widespread publicity about the depletion of fish stocks around the UK, the headlines on all these doomwatch stories conveniently overlook some of the more positive facts about fish supplies.
True, cod stocks in the North Sea, English Channel, Irish Sea and the Atlantic coastline of Scotland are at dangerously low levels. But cod is an internationally traded commodity, sourced from the North Atlantic, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and the Arctic seas of Scandinavia and northern Russia. Cod stocks here could be better, but you only have to watch the morning auction at Peterhead, Europe's biggest whitefish market, to make you think, "Cod crisis? What crisis?". And the main fishing grounds for haddock in the northern part of the North Sea have healthy stock levels.
As for shellfish, North Atlantic cold-water prawns are scare-free and come from a managed fishery that has seen no stock decline. Even better, prices of cold-water North Atlantic prawns have been stable for several years and have no prospect of rising.
In fact, restaurant recognition of shellfish as a main meal focus has been growing, according to secondary processors the Seafood Company, especially in mid-spend casual dining and pub-restaurants. "With increasingly attractive into-kitchen pricing alongside fish such as cod and plaice, shellfish has also tended to become more accessible as a menu choice," says group marketing director Allen Townsend.
This trend is backed by statistics derived from the purchasing behaviour of 13,500 UK consumers by TNS's Family Food Panel, which show that shellfish is now proportionately more significant in catering than other types of seafood. The research says 26% of all shellfish consumed in the UK is eaten at meals away from home.
Fish is a high-profile menu item across Spirit Group's 2,400 pubs, and the company is looking at ways of switching its whitefish offer from cod to haddock. There is a UK regional issue, with haddock being a fish of choice in the North of England and Scotland rather than the South of England, but food development manager Mark Buley says customers are becoming used to a wider range of fish on the menu. As well as introducing haddock, the company is also trying farmed catfish and frozen mahi mahi from the south Atlantic.
Contract caterer Avenance, which buys £2m-worth of fresh fish every year to serve in more than 600 UK contracts, is also exploring new species. Trials of farmed Norwegian white halibut have been successful, with executive chef Rob Kirby praising its "superb fresh sheen" and "firm fleshy texture".
Most sea bass and black bream sold to restaurants are farmed in southern Europe; there are turbot and halibut farms from Norway to Spain; and tuna ranching is being explored in Japan; but after salmon, the world's most popular farmed fish is one seldom seen on UK restaurant menus: tilapia.
Tilapia is a native fish of Africa, but such is its growth rate and high conversion of food to body mass that it is now being produced in 85 countries, with the 2004 global production forecast to be 1.5 million tonnes.
Tilapia is huge on restaurant menus in the USA for the way it can suck in flavours from sauces and marinades, and its price is cheap in fish terms; but, according to Neve, UK chefs don't want it. "We have tried to sell it to chefs as a cheap fresh fish, but it just won't sell on the menu," he says. "The only cheap fish that is beginning to make inroads is hoki from New Zealand, which is selling into public sector catering. That comes in as frozen fillets, but we are smoking them to give a cheaper alternative to smoked haddock and cod.
"The problem for restaurants is when the fish is named on the menu and the customer doesn't recognise the name - many are nervous about ordering it. There are only four or five meats on a restaurant menu; there could be dozens of fish."
Cod farming
In Norway it is hoped that a switch to cod farming will allow salmon farmers crushed under the price collapse to move back into profit. Magnus Skretting, regional director for the world's largest aquaculture company, Marine Harvest, which is investing millions of krone into cod farming, believes that within five years farmed cod will rival wild cod on the restaurant menu.
Production of farmed cod this year in Norway will be three million fish. The 20 Norwegian cod farms currently in operation have a potential production capacity of 70 million juvenile cod. Skretting says that Norwegian fish farmers will not make the mistakes they did with salmon, flooding the market and driving down prices. But 70 million cod as a starting annual production level is hardly the base for a niche product.
Budget buster
The ever-growing cost of fish is felt most keenly in the public sector with its fixed budgets. An imaginative partnership between the Territorial Army and Kerry Foodservice has developed ways to use cheap and under-used fish with Kerry cooking sauces.
The fish-and-sauce combination the TA is currently using is mackerel cooked in cranberry sauce. TA culinary arts team captain Derek Wicks says the sweetness and acidic nature of the cranberries cut through the naturally oily nature of mackerel to give a fish dish that meets the tight food budgets of the Armed Forces and still eats well.
