Sales are forecast to continue to rise and are expected to earn Vietnam producers more than $9 billion (\u20ac6.5 billion) by 2020.<\/p>\n
The most common export product form is the IQF skinless, boneless fillet which is largely produced by hand, although automation is beginning and lines of Cretel skinning machines are now a common sight in Vietnamese fish factories.<\/p>\n
However, Vietnamese pangasius processors are starting to look at the expanding market for convenience or value-added products in Europe, and are planning to develop these products in their own factories rather than export basic fillets to be further processed abroad.<\/p>\n
The obvious value-added product would be a breaded stick, portion or fillet, but the crumb coatings made in Vietnam rarely meet European tastes and the oil used for pre-frying is also different. So the breaded or dusted pangasius products seen in European supermarkets are mostly produced in the importing countries.<\/span><\/p>\n There is another important reason for Vietnamese seafood processors not exporting breaded pangasius products \u2013 the import tariff in Europe on breaded products is between 14-19%, while the tariff on raw fillets is only about 9%. However marinated products, which are regarded as \u2018fresh\u2019 or semi-processed, have a lower import tariff.<\/p>\n Value-added products such as skewers with cubes of pangasius, sometimes interspersed with pieces of vegetables, also attract a lower tariff and again are of interest to Vietnamese processors.<\/p>\n More basic products include pangasius loins cut from the back of the fish and then tray packed in pairs and vacuum-sealed. This product has been introduced by Rahbek of Denmark. Marine Harvest (through Pieters) took up the idea and has introduced it in Belgium and the Netherlands.<\/p>\n Smoked pangasius is thought to have a good future and the skin-on fillets for smoking in Europe would be produced in Vietnam.<\/p>\n Sterk BV from Volendam in the Netherlands is already producing an \u2018eel-smoked\u2019 pangasius for the Aldi discount supermarket chain. The product is hot smoked, which some observers think is not entirely satisfactory as the structure of the fish becomes \u2018too weak\u2019.<\/p>\n There could be a better future for cold smoked pangasius and Tesco has just introduced dyed smoked river cobbler \u2013 its name for pangasius \u2013 fillets on its wet fish counters in the UK.<\/p>\n Leading Vietnamese pangasius exporter, Bianfishco, which recently opened its own research station, plans to build a large state-of-the art factory to manufacture only value-added seafood products.<\/p>\n Equipment being installed will be for breading, marinating, cooking, baking, pre-frying and forming, through to advanced freezing and automatic packing.<\/p>\n Products will include dim sum filled with pangasius, stretched torpedo shrimp and spring rolls. Pham Thi Dieu Hien, president and CEO of Bianfishco has hired a product development specialist from Agrex Saigon, the leading Vietnamese processor for value-added products and plans to bring in a leading chef from France to develop totally new ideas.<\/span><\/p>\n Madame Hien will call her range of value-added products: \u2018Bianfishco Delights\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pangasius, also called panga, basa and river cobbler, is a freshwater fish especially farmed in Vietnam. It is fast growing, cheap to produce, and during the past 20-odd years has made significant inroads into the whitefish sectors of the world\u2019s major markets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquaculture","category-processing-refrigeration"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":253,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/253"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}