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Maryland crabs competing with asia { March 20 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50170-2005Mar19.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50170-2005Mar19.html
Bay Crabs, Against the Tide
At Trade Expo, Producers Fight Asian Import That Leads Market
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 20, 2005; Page C01
BOSTON -- Their table held brochures, business cards and a few cups full of cold crabmeat. It was almost lost amid the bustle of the International Boston Seafood Show, where other exhibitors were showing off automatic salmon slicers, hot "buffalo"-flavored shrimp and a lobster the size of a toddler.
Here stood the losers of a 10-year war over the contents of U.S. crab cakes.
They were Chesapeake Bay blue crab processors, who once dominated their field but have been nearly destroyed by the forces of environmental decline and economic globalization. Now, the country's processed crab business is predominately meat from an Asian species, not from the Chesapeake's familiar blue crab.
Local crabmeat producers are trying to hang on to the gourmet corner of the market they once owned. As their visit to the country's biggest seafood conference showed, they have no fancy props and no catchy slogans.
In fact, they have only one sales pitch left.
"It's all about taste," said Joe Brooks, a processor from Maryland's Eastern Shore.
They would like to brand the crabmeat as a delicacy, much like Kobe beef or Copper River salmon. But they say they have neither the money nor the influence to do it.
The problems with Chesapeake crabs began in the early 1990s, when heavy fishing combined with a mysterious decline in the number of baby crabs returning to the bay for adulthood. The result was a population crash: The bay's crab harvest dropped by more than half.
This change fell hard on crab processors, whose workers steam the crustaceans and pick out their meat at factories on the Eastern Shore. The shortage of work drove pickers to other jobs, forcing the processing companies into a tenuous dependence on immigrant laborers. It also drove customers away.
Todd Moro of M&I Seafood Manufacturers Inc. in Baltimore said his company can get orders for 420,000 crab cakes from just one day of appearances on the QVC cable shopping channel. He said he loves the sweet taste of Chesapeake blue crab -- "without sounding too corny, that's a culinary treasure" -- but business couldn't wait.
"It made us look elsewhere," he said.
In this case, elsewhere meant Asia, where entrepreneurs from Indonesia to India were discovering that a native crab -- the blue swimming crab -- had meat very similar to its cousin, the blue crab. Often, this pasteurized crabmeat could be shipped to the United States and sold for less than blue crab.
Moro's company now sells 100 percent Asian crabmeat -- under the name "Chesapeake Bay Gourmet."
The Phillips company, which sells frozen seafood and operates a chain of seafood restaurants from Ocean City to the District's waterfront in Southwest, also converted to using mainly Asian meat.
Honey Konicoff, a spokeswoman for the company, said crab cakes are still referred to as "Maryland style," because they mix the Asian meat with a local recipe that includes mustard, mayonnaise and bread crumbs.
"You think every piece of New York-style cheesecake you eat comes from New York?" she said.
This flood of imported meat has squeezed out many blue crab processors, who couldn't match the lower prices. In all, 20 to 25 Maryland picking houses have shut down in the past 10 years, according to resource economist Douglas Lipton of the University of Maryland.
Local crabmeat producers have lobbied for tariffs on the imports and asked the Food and Drug Administration to crack down on Asian crab that's labeled simply "crab meat," a term theoretically reserved for blue crab.
None of their efforts produced the results they wanted.
They've also tried to come up with advertising efforts to distinguish their products from the imports, including one that would have branded their meat "USA American Blue Crab."
But the funding has not been there -- from the state or the producers -- a problem blamed partly on the influence of Phillips.
"I can't go on TV and say, 'You shouldn't go buy this foreign crabmeat,' " said Noreen L. Eberly of the seafood marketing section of the Maryland Department of Agriculture. "Especially because of Phillips."
So, local processors have spent the past few years trying to go gourmet. They've published recipe calendars to reach individual consumers and use trade shows such as Boston's to target gourmet restaurants and seafood markets.
The pitch, in essence, is this:
"It's a sweet taste, versus a bland taste. Versus no taste," said Shirley A. Estes, of the Virginia Marine Products Board, staffing a booth at the Boston show last week.
But a glance across this massive convention showed that other U.S. fisheries industries are also trying this tack, with varied success. Customers now ask for Copper River salmon from Alaska by name, but native shrimp and crabmeat haven't caught on in the same way.
"You need a flavor, you need a color," said Richard Gutting, a lawyer who represents fishing interests. "It's not as dramatic as a real deep-red salmon."
So far, the impact of blue crab marketing is fairly feeble.
One sign was the massive booth run by Phillips -- a three-ring seafood circus featuring an open kitchen, two chefs and a parade of crab appetizers being snapped up by passersby.
If these people were bothered by the fact that it wasn't blue crab meat, it was hard to tell.
And, at Estes's booth, the tubs of Virginia crabmeat had only the words "Chesapeake Bay" written on them in tiny text.
Estes squinted at the tub. The heart and soul of her sales pitch -- the brand that is supposed to keep the industry alive -- was so small it required glasses to read.
"Our companies are not doing anything terribly right," she said. "Are they?"
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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