BOSTON (AP) — The future of fish is looking a lot like… salami? And meatballs. And fried chicken. And breakfast sausage. And, of course, spareribs and burgers. This is America, after all.
Welcome to the era of surreptitious seafood, an industry gamble that overcoming Americans’ relative disinterest in the meat of the sea is all a matter of making fish look and taste less like, well, fish.
“Our Taiwanese magic is making tuna taste like fried chicken,”
said Jack Chi, a spokesman for Tuna Fresh, a Taiwan-based company that sells tuna as fried “nuggets” and breaded chicken-tender-like strips. “We wanted to be able to engage in the U.S. market, and we found that fried foods are the way.”
Chi’s company was one of hundreds showcasing their products at the recent Seafood Expo North America in Boston. And among the sea of smoked salmons, scallops and all manner of crustaceans, one trend stood out: The seafood being pitched to the American market is looking less and less like seafood.
“It’s been a big trend for the last couple of years,” said Justin Rogers, a sales manager with SK Food Brands in Los Angeles. Among his company’s recent offerings: shrimp burgers, both slider-size and Whopper-worthy. “It makes it more palatable to people who aren’t big seafood fans. Especially with things like these sliders, it gives them an entry point.”
Americans have a notoriously limited appetite for seafood, consuming just about 19 pounds a year -- a number that has budged only a bit in a century -- most of it as shrimp and salmon. The global average is 45 pounds, while some European countries clock in closer to 90 pounds. Iceland leads everyone with around 200 pounds per year.
Disguising seafood to appeal to Americans isn’t entirely new. After all, frozen fish sticks and McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish hardly scream catch of the day. But many of the newer products are an entirely different species. Or rather, are trying to be.
“It looks like a Slim Jim by design,” Harbor Bell Seafoods spokeswoman Holly Phillips said of the Seattle company’s salmon snack strips, available in smoked, lemon-pepper, mango and -- curiously -- original. “It doesn’t smell fishy. It doesn’t taste fishy.”
If an “original” salmon snack stick doesn’t taste fishy, what DOES it taste like? After a couple chewy bites, let’s go with Slim Jim adjacent and move on.
Not everyone thinks covert crustaceans are a good thing.
“Eat fish that looks like fish!” says Niaz Dorry, coordinating director of the North American Marine Alliance, an advocacy group for sustainable seafood practices. “The likelihood that that fish came from a community-based, scale-appropriate entity is much higher if that fish still looks like what it was when it was swimming in the water. Factory scale and fake are the two F-words I tell everybody to avoid.”
The pivot to stealthy seafood comes at a critical time for the industry. The only real growth in sales has come from the sushi counter (looking at you, Gen Z) and price hikes (not exactly helping the cause). The $24 billion market otherwise has been flat for years, with just 10% of shoppers accounting for nearly half of sales (seafood, apparently, is an all-in sort of thing).
Part of sushi’s appeal is its blend of convenience and novelty, said Steve Markenson, vice president of research and insights for consumer marketing firm FMI. Some of the newer products may offer similar appeal, but he’s not convinced it will be enough.
“The non-seafood folks — which is about 40% of the population — I don’t know that this is really going to be appealing to them,” he said. “They’re not looking to necessarily add seafood into their diet.”
Seafood lovers aren’t a sure bet, either. That 10% of dedicated seafood shoppers want it for what it is, not cleverly disguised. “They love what they love about it,” Markenson said. “They might want it seasoned up a little, but they want that full-blown salmon.”
Oddly, the most likely audience may well be the one typically most averse to seafood -- the very young, said Joshua Bickert, a seafood market reporter and analyst for Expana. “If you package it like hot dogs and hamburgers and chicken tenders, you maybe change that mindset at a younger age.”
For Mike Simon, owner of Hialeah, Florida-based Surfsnax, it’s a matter of making the foreign feel familiar. “We want to put it in a format that people are used to eating,” he said as he sliced off a round of his company’s salmon salami. “But it’s not hiding that it’s salmon.”
Not so sure about that. After being cured, shaped and served like a traditional salami, his product hardly looked seaworthy. But it was tasty.
The most audacious offering was fish spareribs from the Amazon. Brazilian tambaqui is a beefy freshwater fish that just happens to have a physique perfect for slicing into meaty, pork-like ribs. Friocenter Pescados spokesman Danillo Souza Alves was quick to point out that tambaqui sports a far higher meat-to-bone ratio on its ribs than pork. And truthfully, they do taste pretty meaty.
“It’s a finger food. You can easily eat it in stadiums for football, baseball and hockey,” he said.
Well, let’s not go crazy.
Americans do love a chip, however. And all manner of seafood are being turned into crackers, chips and crunchy sticks. Ina Park, a spokeswoman for the expo’s Korean pavilion, was eager to introduce Balance Grow’s Fried Calamari Snack, which looked like slightly malformed Utz Potato Stix. Park had other ideas.
“They taste like Cheetos,” she said.
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J.M. Hirsch is a food and travel journalist, and the former food editor for The Associated Press.
