Salmon export markets opening up, says Scottish Sea Farms chief
Scottish Sea Farms boss Jim Gallagher today revealed that the salmon farmer was seeing “a nice bounce” in export markets previously closed by the Covid-19 pandemic, along with increased retail sales in the UK.
He also said SSF was so far having a “fantastic biological year” with a 96% fish survival rate, and that it expects to recruit more staff as it grows volumes.
“France, Italy, Spain, Germany, even the Far East, are all open again,” the SSF managing director said in an interview on BBC Radio Scotland.
Buoyant about opportunities
“Our challenges in the beginning in the Far East were largely down to the options, availability and cost of freight, but we’ve definitely seen in the last three or four weeks quite a significant improvement, and I’m feeling very buoyant about salmon’s opportunity to help Scotland recover in this situation.”
Gallagher told business correspondent Andrew Black that April had been very challenging for SSF, as it had for most businesses, “but our customers and our products are really quite resilient”.
He also pointed out that salmon farming had benefited from some great flexibility from the Scottish government.
Asked about the domestic market, Gallagher said: “All of our customers in the UK at retail level are showing double-digit growth in terms of volume. People have changed their shopping behaviour, they’re now shopping less frequently but they’re going to that sort-of weekly shop, and that weekly shop is probably buying more than they would do if they were going in multiple times.
“Food service has been a bit of a challenge, but I expect in the coming three, four, five weeks that we’re going to see the opportunity for some restaurant activity.”
Gallagher said the salmon industry could play a role in helping Scotland recover from the economic effects of the Covid-19 lockdown.
£120m local spend
“We as a sector have the opportunity to provide really highly skilled, highly paid jobs - the average salary in our sector is around £34k, £11k more than the average salary in Scotland - and those are in rural communities,” he said in the interview, which was broadcast on the station’s flagship current affairs programme, Good Morning Scotland.
“Our spend with the value chain, local suppliers in Scotland, is over £120 million this year. Of that, the top 50 of our suppliers in Scotland are getting around £375,000 from us.
“We’re very committed to continue with that and we think that [for] Scotland, if we look at a macro level, from careers to schools to dealing with obesity, salmon is a really healthy, highly nutritious, low carbon protein. We think that in the circular economy here, and in the value chain in Scotland, we can really help in the recovery phase.”
Recruiting more
Asked if that included creating new jobs, Gallagher replied: “Absolutely. Our volumes are growing for next year. We’re opening some new farms, we’ll need some more people in our processing facility.
“Everybody’s talking about [the expectation that] the level of unemployment is going to be increasing. We don’t expect that to be happening in our business, it’s the opposite for us: we expect that we will be recruiting more people – highly skilled, highly paid jobs. We’re very confident that we can help support Scotland in the recovery phase.”
