| 33 T T Virginia Wright Seafood that’s as fresh as you can get Leigh Fish still does what it has always set out to do – keep the timeline from catch to delivery as short as possible. Leigh Fish REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT When marine biologist Tom Searle joined Leigh Fish 13 years ago as factory manager, the company was exporting all its fish overseas, but following the purchase of the business by Foodstuffs five years ago, while 70% is still exported, the company’s fresh fish is now available in Pak’nSave, New World and Four Square stores around the country. Now, as Leigh Fish manager and acting head of seafood, Foodstuffs North Island, Tom says: “It didn’t feel right to be sending it all offshore, so we started a food service business supplying restaurants throughout New Zealand about eight years ago, and nowadays you can literally go and buy our fish at your local store, which we deliver daily, so it’s as fresh as you can get anywhere,” says Tom. When he says as fresh as you can get anywhere he really means it, and he’s proud that Leigh Fish still does what it has always set out to do – keep the timeline from catch to delivery as short as possible. Shifts of workers start each morning at 4am and 5am to help that happen. Regardless of where the fish ends up once it comes out of the water, whether that’s in Tauranga or Northland, it’s brought to Leigh (20 minutes north of Warkworth) through the night, hitting the early-morning packing line the following morning so it’s ready to be flown to its destination that afternoon. “We’re not sitting on a catch in the chiller and letting it out gradually through the week like some others do. The chillers fill and then empty every single day, so we don’t play the market in that way, we concentrate on getting it to the customer as quick as we can. Caught one day, packed the next and the time to market is as fast as the plane can go, with no lag in between for the sake of convenience,” says Tom. Another key factor about the fish from Leigh Fish is that 90% of it goes out whole, gut in, as untouched as they can manage, all in the interest of preserving the freshness of that fish to the maximum extent they can. According to Tom, the key to it is the way it’s handled on the vessel. The mostly longline fish comes of the water alive and is brain-spiked to bring death very quickly with minimal stress. They avoid putting ice directly on to the fish because it takes away the natural slime, instead cooling the fish down very quickly in a slurry of saltwater and ice before it is packed into small, 15kg fish bins. “They’re packed on their ends, ‘soldier packed’ we call it, so we sit the fish belly down, which preserves the slime and their natural colour and helps keep them fresh.” They fish to target when they can as well – for example, when Chinese New Year is coming up and they know there’ll be a demand for smaller fish because they tend to be eaten whole. “They’ll target by the time of day and the bait, and where they’re fishing, so they can catch those smaller fish, but once that market’s full we let them know and they’ll switch to bigger fish. The whole system pays its best rate for best quality too, so it’s not a fixed rate per kilo of fish, which encourages excellence,” says Tom. That’s the way it’s always been at Leigh Fish, and they are determined to stick to that ethos of paying for quality and catching to market, he points out. “We go ‘hey what do you guys want, give us a forecast’ then we try to catch to match that. “Obviously it’s fishing, so you’re never spot on, but it’s much better being market driven than supply driven.” With Leigh Fish now supplying fish to Michelin Star restaurants in Mediterranean countries where they have fished the oceans clean of species like gurnard and scorpion fish (granddaddy hapuka), Tom is certain that New Zealand’s Quota Management System will help keep those and other species available to be fished and supplied here and overseas well into the future. www.wildfishnz.com admin@wildfishnz.com 021793352 Wild Fish NZ Ltd wildfishnz • Import/Export Air &Ocean • Customs Brokerage • Third Party Logistics (3PL) • Perishable Logistics • Event Logistics Proudly Supporting Leigh Fish www.gvi.co.nz
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