Salmon smoker plans more space and products

South Uist-based Salar Smokehouse is also preparing to launch an expanded, re-packaged product range early next year, as well as tripling production from next week to meet increased demand ahead of Christmas.

The company, which won the New Business Award at last Friday's Highlands & Islands Food & Drink awards event in Inverness, has been in business since 2015, when current owner Iain MacRury bought the smokery from previous owner Loch Duart and re-introduced the Salar brand. It has a staff of 10, including MacRury.

"We are currently in discussion with the local landowners (community-ownership group Stòras Uibhist) to build new premises, and have a local produce hub in South Uist here, working with other local companies to have a hub of local businesses where we can all work together to reduce distribution costs and things like that," said MacRury.

Beneficial to everybody

"The sites we are looking at are sites which are beneficial to everybody. At this stage there are three main partners but it’s open for anybody else to join in. There will be extra facilities put on this site for people to rent long-term, short-term.

“We would have new premises, hopefully with a visitor centre on the side of that to help bring in visitors to the smokehouse. We would also be relocating closer to the main road: we miss out on passing trade because of where we are. We are almost three miles off the main road; off the main tourist route, off the main supply route, so it’s quite difficult for customers to find us."

Viewing gallery

Despite that, MacRury said the business still got “quite a lot of footfall from visitors" in the summer, and a daily request was that they wanted to see the smoking process. "At the moment we’re not suitable for public viewing – we’d have to take them into the production areas, which wouldn’t work. So one of the plans is to have a viewing gallery, so they will be able to walk through a corridor and watch the whole process from start to finish. I think that would be a great selling point for us. The more we involve the customers the better.”

Salar produces five varieties of its flaky smoked salmon, which it makes from farmed Scottish salmon, but is also planning to start selling smoked mussels, crabs, lobsters, langoustines and scallops, along with white fish which it already smokes but only sells from the smokehouse.

Great time to win awards

“Flaky smoked salmon was launched – actually it’s the 20^th anniversary next month – at the BBC Good Food Show in Birmingham in 1997," said MacRury, who used to work as Loch Duart's production manager at the smokehouse. "Salar itself had been in existence 10 years prior to that. The original owners had a fish farm and diversified into smoking.

“It’s a great time to be winning awards, it’s going to help us with a bit of publicity. We’re doing a special edition this year to recognise that 20^th anniversary. We are launching special edition packaging, where we are going to go back, for our special edition, to the original packaging with a modern twist to it."

MacRury said staff would be working more hours in the run-up to Christmas. “The sales and office staff, their hours increase and we also take on extra staff for that. There’s a lot of telephone orders, a lot of internet orders, and also our despatch staff have extended hours."

He added: “We also have quite a few corporate orders at Christmas time, for companies who send it to their clients all over the world. We’ll do a bespoke service for them, producing whatever they want for their clients, and we’ll post it direct to their door."