CHINA SEAFOOD: The Whole Inside Story

Serious Sanitation: Simply Seafood® owner Peter Redmayne and Simply Seafood® quality inspectors in an air lock prior to entering a processing workshop in a plant in Qingdao, China.

The big news on the fish front this summer was the action taken by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that placed restrictions on imports of certain farm-raised seafood from China. Although it was widely reported in the U.S. media as a “ban” on the imports of the species in question, in fact the FDA action is an “import alert,” which requires mandatory testing of a handful of species, including shrimp, catfish, carp and eel, before they can be sold in the U.S.

FDA emphasized that there was minimal risk to public health

What concerns the FDA is the continued use of banned antibiotics and antimicrobials by some Chinese fish farmers to grow certain species. From October of 2006 to May of this year, the FDA found that 25 percent of the Chinese shrimp, catfish, carp and eel it tested had residues of the banned substances that were above the maximum allowed level of 1 part per billion.

However, since the FDA emphasized that there was minimal risk to public health in consuming these products, there was no recall of product already in distribution. Rather, the FDA said, its action was a long-term precautionary measure. Once Chinese exporters show they can ship these products residue free, they can export them without the testing mandated by the import alert.

China is the leading supplier of imported seafood to the U.S.

Lost in the media frenzy about the “ban on Chinese seafood” was the fact that China is the leading supplier of imported seafood to the U.S. and many other countries in the world. While a lot of this seafood is caught by Chinese boats or raised by Chinese fish farmers (China accounts for almost half the world’s farm-raised production of marine products), much of the fish exported by China to the U.S. was caught thousands of miles away.

This summer, for example, more than 100 million pounds of Alaska’s salmon harvest will be exported to China for further processing

Over the past decade, China has used its low labor costs and economies of scale to become “the world’s seafood processing plant.” Seafood from around the world is shipped to China, where it is filleted, bones are removed and it is turned into a growing variety of value-added products for export to markets around the world. This summer, for example, more than 100 million pounds of Alaska’s salmon harvest will be exported to China for further processing – almost a quarter of the state’s entire catch. Just three years ago, less than 25 million pounds of Alaska salmon were exported to China.

When I first started going to China in the mid 1990s, most of the seafood processing plants were operated by state-owned companies and most of them were relatively crude affairs. That’s not the case now. Over the past decade, Chinese entrepreneurs have constructed scores of new processing plants, most of which are located near Qingdao or Dalian, two cities on the country’s northeastern coast.

I would rate this new generation of Chinese seafood processing plants, including the ones we use to produce products for our growing line of Simply Seafood® brand seafood, as good as any I have seen in more than 25 years in this industry.

Salmon surgery: Removing bones from Simply Seafood’s wild salmon products

Before you can enter the processing areas in these plants, visitors must be scrubbed down and outfitted like they are entering an operating room in a hospital. These plants don’t have even the faintest whiff of fish, an indication of how seriously their managers pay attention to sanitation and quality control.

The development of a large seafood reprocessing industry in China has made it possible to provide consumers around the world with high-quality seafood in convenient product forms. And because the Chinese are very cost efficient operators, these products are an excellent value. While there are legitimate issues with some Chinese seafood products, it’s important to keep in mind that they account for a small fraction of China’s seafood exports. To supply discerning markets in the EU, Japan and North America, the Chinese know they have to supply safe, high-quality seafood on a regular basis. If they had not been doing that, their industry would not be the seafood exporting powerhouse it is today.

Rest assured that at Simply Seafood®, we will continue to source only the highest quality, safest seafood from sustainable fisheries around the world (none of the products singled out recently by the FDA have ever been sold by Simply Seafood®). You can be confident that when we source product from China it will be both excellent quality – and an excellent value.

All the Best,

Peter Redmayne
President
Simply Seafood®