Processors cheating at the request of customers

The new regulation, which was due to come into effect on 1 January this year, will restrict the amount of ice glaze on exported pangasius products to 10% and the amount of humidity to 83%.

Exporters in An Giang Province had objected to the regulation saying it would cost them business. Doan Toi, general director of major pangasius exporter Nam Viet Corporation (Navico), told the Vietnamese media that many buyers do not care about the glazing or humidity ratios. “So the new rule does not help us to sell more products,” he said. “If implemented, we would have no choice but to close our plants and lay off employees.”

Vietnamese pangasius exporters claim that their customers would not accept higher prices, so they cannot improve the quality of their products if this would make them more expensive. This is despite delegates at a fisheries meeting in Ho Chi Minh City at the beginning of the year urging the Vietnamese government to strengthen the quality management of the pangasius production process from brood stock and animal feed to processing.

Cutting corners
Instances of fish processors cutting corners to reduce product price have been highlighted by frozen seafood supplier Tradex Foods of British Columbia, Canada. Tradex Foods has published a series of articles and videos on its School of Fish website illustrating the techniques used by processors to offer cut price seafood products. These include tumbling fish fillets in sodium tripolyphospate solutions in order to absorb liquid, excessive glazing, species substitution etc.

Tradex Foods also illustrates how thin pieces of processing ‘waste’ are folded into fillet portions before glazing and freezing. What then seem like ‘normal’ portions of a certain weight are in fact composite portions. Upon thawing the extra pieces separate out and the eventual customer is confronted by pieces of fish when he or she is expecting a single portion.

Unfortunately no one seems to think about the consumer’s likely reaction to this deception. Not only is he or she never going to buy that particular product again, but quite possibly is never going to buy frozen fish portions again.

Cheating by rogue processors in order to save cost is not new and is not restricted to particular countries. Some years back in the UK when breaded scampi (Nephrops norvegicus tails) was a popular catering dish, pieces of scampi meat would be soaked in polyphosphate solution overnight, then extruded into tail like forms, excessively glazed and double coated with breadcrumbs.

Biting into the final product, which was usually deep fried, would produce a stream of hot liquid and then there would be a hole in the coating with residual bits of scampi meat in the middle.

However, as Michael Warren, vice-president of procurement at Tradex Foods, who captured the fillet portion scam on video by thawing out a product from a ‘leading manufacturer’, says of these deplorable practices, “It’s just too bad that the actions of a few unscrupulous processors can damage the reputation of the rest of the industry.”