l n the crab-picking room at Sea Safari, 

 Ltd. in Belhaven, women in waterproof boots, 

 aprons and caps of many colors crowd around 

 tables mounded high with cooked blue crabs. 

 Beneath the audible chaos of many compering 

 conversations is the visual rhythm of hands 

 precisely disassembling crustaceans into 

 handpicked, "gourmet" crabmeat. 



The scene is its own contradiction. It is 

 similar to crab-picking houses of the past, but the 

 similarity merely accentuates the degree to 

 which things have changed, and are changing. 

 Local women who learned crab picking at their 

 mothers' knees are rare. Conversations around 

 the picking tables are in Spanish. 



The picking house is only one in a maze of 

 nondescript buildings collectively called Sea 

 Safari on the Pungo River near the Pamlico 

 Sound. The first clue that this is not an ordinary 

 seafood processing plant is finding yourself 

 eyeball-to-eyeball with a gigantic buffalo head 

 mounted on the wall in a second-floor office 

 area. 



Sea Safari's owner, Topper Bateman, is an 

 avid hunter, says Sarah Harris, the company's 

 director of research and development. The 

 buffalo was bagged by Bateman's wife on a 

 hunting expedition. 



While the buffalo on the wall has nothing 

 to do with seafood, it may have, subliminally at 

 least, influenced the name of one of Sea Safari's 



newest products — the Buffalo Catfish Nugget, 

 a very lightly battered, deep-fried piece of 

 succulent North Carolina aquacultured catfish. 



The nugget is one of Harris' favorites from 

 the company's line of "value-added" products 

 and represents the expedition that Sea Safari is 

 taking into the brave new world of global 

 marketing. 



Value-added foods are processed to be 

 different in form, taste and texture from the 

 principal raw ingredients. Barry Nash of North 

 Carolina Sea Grant and the North Carolina State 

 University Seafood Lab says that "value," in this 

 context, means "using processing techniques, 

 novel ingredients or packaging to enhance the 

 health attributes, the sensory characteristics or 

 the convenience of food." 



Traditionally, Sea Safari's product list 

 consisted of seafood products to be used as 

 ingredients themselves, such as frozen crabmeat 

 in a variety of forms — from jumbo lump to 

 "cocktail fingers." 



The value-added products began as a 

 project funded by the North Carolina Fishery 

 Resource Grant Program. Bateman applied for a 

 grant from the program and put Harris in charge 

 of developing the new items. 



"The seafood industry has to diversify 

 beyond commodities to compete in the global 

 seafood market," Harris says, noting that many 

 of the state's crab processing plants have gone 



out of business in recent years due, in part, to 

 competition from imported crabmeat. 



Product development is too costly and time- 

 consuming for many small businesses. Yet, 

 without this type of diversification, crab 

 processing plants are likely to continue in a 

 downward spiral. 



The FRG project paired Harris with Nash to 

 create a new line of crabmeat-based, value-added 

 products. 



FRG was custom-designed for this scenario. 

 Funded by the N.C. General Assembly and 

 administered by North Carolina Sea Grant, the 

 program helps people in fishing and seafood 

 industries to develop ideas for improving their 

 businesses or the resources they depend upon. 



Nash points to the success of Wanchese Fish 

 Company in developing the "scallop medallion" 

 in a previous FRG project that used enzymatic 

 cold-binding to create large scallops from smaller, 

 less profitable ones. 



"The Sea Safari FRG was designed to show 

 how textured vegetable proteins could add value 

 to processed or cooked seafood," Nash explains. 

 He and Harris proposed creating four new 

 products: shrimp and crab appetizers, an 

 inexpensive crab cake to target an economy 

 market, and a higher priced crab cake to appeal to 

 more affluent customers who shop online. 



Results exceeded expectations. 



Call it overachievement: The four products 

 Harris and Nash set out to create ended up 

 increasing the company's list of value-added 

 seafoods from four to 22. 



The success of the project, however, is more 

 than numbers of products developed. Information 

 that will be in the final report from the project can 

 help other seafood processors, because, like it or 

 not, global seafood competition has arrived in 

 North Carolina. 



ON THE WAY 



TO A GLOBAL MARKET 



The crabmeat trade in North Carolina is 

 older, probably, than the establishment of the state. 



"It goes back to John White and the Lost 

 Colony on Roanoke Island," says David Green, 

 director of N.C. State's Center for Marine 

 Sciences and Technology in Morehead City. Only 

 then, crabs were a literal trade — between the 

 settlers and native Americans. 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 17 



