Value-Added 



It's 5:30 p.m. and you're frantically 

 searching the frozen-food case at the 

 grocery store for tonight's dinner. You 

 have four criteria. It has to be easy, 

 quick, nutritious and reasonably priced. 



Your eye falls on the shrimp 

 marinara box with a mouth-watering, 

 hunger-inducing color photograph. 

 You check the price — $2.69. That's 

 reasonable. You reach inside the case, 

 pull out the box and flip to the back 

 to read the cooking instructions and 

 nutritional information. Cooks in 20 

 minutes in a conventional oven, eight 

 minutes in the microwave. Low in fat. 

 That's it — tonight's dinner. 



You have just purchased a value- 

 added seafood product. 



Value-added is a term coined by 

 the food industry to describe any 

 product that has been processed to 

 save time, increase ease of use and 

 improve upon taste. 



"Value-added means creating a 

 product that improves customer 

 satisfaction over the basic commodity," 

 says Ed Rowell, director of seafood 

 sales for East Coast Food Brokerage Inc. 



Seafood was a latecomer to the 

 value-added food market. Other than 

 processed fish sticks and canned tuna, 

 sardines, oysters and clams, little effort 

 was made until the 1980s to add value 

 and increase the appeal of processed 

 seafood. 



Early marketing efforts focused on 

 consumer acceptance of raw fish and 

 shellfish. Seafood was a restaurant item. 

 Most Americans, especially those away 

 from coastlines, didn't want the 

 fisherman's catch in their homes. They 

 didn't like the way it smelled, and they 

 were uncertain how to buy and cook it. 



But in the mid-1980s, seafood 

 became a touted health food. American 

 consumption of fish and shellfish 

 skyrocketed. Consumer knowledge 



expanded, but many shoppers remained 

 reluctant to bring seafood home. They 

 still preferred to let the restaurant do 

 the cooking, says Jim Daniels, director 

 of procurement for Tyson Foods' 

 Seafood Division. 



Seafood processors saw the 

 potential. If they could provide a 

 ready-to-cook seafood product that 

 consumers could pop in the oven, then 

 maybe, just maybe, seafood had a place 

 in the value-added market. 



At first, the large food corpora- 

 tions — Stouffers, Gorton's, Mrs. 

 Paul's — introduced value-added 

 seafood products, everything from 

 seafood lasagna to shrimp marinara. 

 Now smaller processing companies, 

 including several in North Carolina, 

 are bidding for consumer dollars and 

 loyalty. 



In North Carolina, fishermen net 

 118 million pounds of edible fish and 

 shellfish a year. Currently, most of the 

 fish is handled by processors who do 

 little more than head, gut and occasion- 

 ally fillet it. In the case of shellfish, 

 it's shucked, shelled or picked. Then 

 the seafood is boxed and sold to other 

 processors, restaurants and retailers. 

 Often, they add value to fish and 

 shellfish through further processing 

 and reap the largest payoff. 



"The majority of the seafood 

 processed here goes out of this state," 

 says Connell Purvis, owner of Sea 

 Snacks, Inc. "It comes back at a higher 

 price and a lower quality. North 

 Carolina processors need to change 

 that, and value-added processing 

 makes sense as a way to change." 



David Green agrees. 



Green heads the N.C. State 

 University Seafood Laboratory in 

 Morehead City. He says more Tar Heel 

 seafood processors are asking ques- 

 tions about value-added products, and 



