Seafood industry nets major growth in Scotland

THESE are balmy days for the Scottish seafood industry, which has a confidence about it unmatched since the far-off era when fish ruled supreme as the main protein source in the kitchen.

The 2.2 billion UK seafood market is growing at around 10 per cent a year, outperforming meat and poultry. All very good news for Scotland's 230 seafood processing plants, and the 7,000 people they employ.

As the Scots' main concern about fish becomes less about the crispiness of the surrounding batter and the width of the accompanying chips, and more about the Omega 3 oils it might contain, or the "food miles" involved in getting it here, the seafood processing industry is undergoing a startling makeover.

This historically unglamorous industry, with its reputation for low wages, unpleasant working conditions and tonnes of waste, has become one of the Scottish food sector's rising stars, prompting massive private sector investment and attracting and retaining workers, as well as winning plaudits for efficiency and innovation.

"Certainly we are riding an upward trend at the moment," says Nicki Holmyard, spokeswoman for the industry group Seafood Scotland.

"More and more consumers are buying fish, and looking for different products, and you see this reflected in the way that fishermen are getting a good price for their produce and are investing more money in boats than previously. It adds to the perception that the long decline in the Scottish industry has bottomed out.

"From the consumers' point of view, they want something prepared that they can use quickly. It's all about convenience, and this is the sector that producers are putting huge investment into."

So far no-one has invested more than Macrae, the venerable Scottish company, owned by the Grimsby giant Young's (with a turnover of 500 million) which employs 1,800 people in Scotland, and which earlier this month opened the UK's most up to date seafood processing plant in Livingston, doubling the capacity of its previous plant in Granton, Edinburgh.

Employing 260 people and covering 64,000sq ft, Macrae's 10m plant is actually three separate factories in one - the first for the cold smoking of salmon and trout, the second for the hot smoking of pelagic species like herring and mackerel, as well as salmon haddock and trout, and the third area looking after the other speciality seafood, such as shellfish, pates, cocktails and other value-added products.

Each of these separate parts is divided into low-care preparatory areas, cooking sections and high-care processing, packaging and dispatch.

The demands of food safety make it a maze of doors - there are 150 of them in total - and 74 separate areas. It is, says the managing director Roy Cunningham, "an incredibly complex factory".

But while the Livingston plant is as high-tech as they come in terms of hygiene and technical controls, the actual mechanisation levels are paradoxically low.

Explains Cunningham: "Apart from the kilns for smoking and poaching, we favour traditional production methods over mechanical efficiency. Quality is everything to us."

All of its products are destined for the shelves of the supermarket chain Waitrose, which is preparing an expansion plan in which Scotland will feature predominantly, one of the reasons that the empire of chilled seafood is about to increase substantially.

"The thought that 70 per cent of our raw materials come from Scotland and are being processed in Scotland is a good one, for the people we employ and for the people in the supply chain."

While seafood consumption is increasing both in volume and sophistication, the pressure to innovate has never been higher.

"The new-look seafood processing industry has got wise to the never ending pressure to present new products in new styles, to tempt the novelty-hungry supermarket shopper.

Macrae's has to come up with the ideas to tempt the highly sophisticated Waitrose buying operation, striving for novelty while keeping tabs on inflationary costs, and not losing sight of what consumers actually want. Even if the Waitrose shopper is not exactly representative of the average Scottish food consumer, there seems little doubt that the great Scottish public is catching up fast.

NEPHROPS WITHOUT HONOUR..

THEY could be the next biggest thing in seafood, bringing major benefits to producers, and consumers, and reducing the food miles involved in sourcing seafood from far-flung seas. After all Scottish waters produce the highest global volumes of Nephrops Norvegicus, more familiarly known as Scottish langoustine, which are also the highest-value wild-caught fishery in the UK - Scotland's 75 per cent of the UK yield is valued at 70 million a year.

But British consumers don't like fiddling with their shells to get at them, so a staggering 90 per cent go abroad, mainly to southern Europe, says Mike Parker, deputy chief executive of Young's seafood.

"Langoustine is a tremendous opportunity area, and one of our key development objectives is to develop the huge latent market for it at home, both as traditional scampi and also as fresh whole shellfish," he said

Backed by the industry body Seafood Scotland, which sees "huge benefits" in developing the sector, and by Waitrose, Macrae is road testing new ways of presenting langoustine to the consumer.