Consumers 'are misled' over salmon quality

Published on Sunday 18 January 2004 00:00

THE boss of Loch Fyne Oysters has waded into the Scottish farmed salmon toxins scare by criticising retailers in the country’s £300m salmon industry for misleading customers with product labelling.

Andrew Lane, the Argyle-based firm’s managing director, also claimed that producers who lose business following the much publicised scare earlier this month have only themselves to blame.

In a hard-hitting appraisal of how salmon is sold in both the UK and abroad, Lane said: "Often you see very little on the label, yet there are great variations in the quality of salmon being produced.

"In contrast, we make a point of comprehensively informing our home and export customer base and this is paying off for us during this uncertain period."

Lane led a 4m management and employee buyout of the business last year.

Meanwhile, up to 10 head office jobs are to disappear at Scotland’s largest salmon farm operator, Marine Harvest.

The company plans to move out of its offices in the grand setting of Craigcrook Castle in Edinburgh as part of a cost-cutting plan.

Staff numbers will fall from 25 to 15 as administrative jobs are centralised with Marine Harvest’s holding company, Nutreco, in the Netherlands.

Graham Dear, Marine Harvest Scotland’s managing director, said a number of sales and finance jobs will move to the Netherlands and Norway, although other sales jobs will move into Scotland.

Marine Harvest has identified two potential office sites in its target area of a 10-mile circle around Edinburgh Airport.

Last year, Marine Harvest made 82 staff redundant in Stornoway when it centralised salmon processing in Fort William. Another 20 were made redundant elsewhere in the Western Isles as the group sought to drive down costs.

The company’s sales fell by 6% to 66.7m in 2002, the last year for which figures were available. Loch Fyne has performed better, with UK sales up 30% for the first two weeks in January, compared with the same month last year.

Lane added that exports have not been adversely affected. But he revealed Loch Fyne has received queries from as far afield as Hong Kong, South Africa and Switzerland about the state of its salmon following the recent adverse reports.

In each case, he said, he was able to reassure the customer that the product was safe. Overseas sales account for 1m of the firm’s 8m turnover.

Lane’s claim is backed by Scottish Quality Salmon, the umbrella organisation representing 50 companies producing 65% of Scotland’s salmon.

Chief executive Brian Simpson said: "The question of labelling is one on which we have been campaigning for some time. The consumer is not getting enough information to make informed choices, despite a change in European regulations.

"Our quality assurance message is very robust and yet is getting diluted by the way in which some retailers choose to label their salmon," he said.

It was too early to gauge the effect on sector sales caused by the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) claim.

Loch Fyne stopped exporting to the US last year, due to what Lane described as "severe disruption" of that market following Stateside bio-terrorism counter-measures.

"Our packages kept getting arrested and so we decided it was a no-go area. Nowadays, the States gets most of its salmon from Canada and Chile, the latter being a heavily industrialised sector," he added.

International anxiety followed a report in Science magazine by a team of North American academics. They claimed farmed salmon from Scotland contained high levels of toxic PCBs compared with wild salmon or farmed fish from other countries.

Loch Fyne’s website tells readers that dioxins are everywhere, including in milk, cheese, pork and vegetables along with fish, and the market should not be put off by "scare stories" about Scottish farmed salmon, which is farmed well within internationally recognised standards.