The seafood industry is increasingly marketing fish products that look and taste like meat—such as salami, meatballs, and fried chicken—to overcome Americans' relative disinterest in seafood, a trend highlighted at the recent Seafood Expo North America in Boston. Making seafood look less like seafood has been a big trend for the last couple of years, making it more palatable to people who aren't big seafood fans and gives them an entry point. Companies like Tuna Fresh, based in Taiwan, are capitalizing on this approach by selling tuna as fried 'nuggets' and breaded chicken-tender-like strips.
S. market. Similarly, SK Food Brands offers shrimp burgers in slider-size and Whopper-worthy sizes, and Harbor Bell Seafoods sells salmon snack strips in smoked, lemon-pepper, mango, and original flavors designed to look like a Slim Jim, don't smell fishy, and don't taste fishy.
American seafood consumption averages about 19 pounds per year, most of it as shrimp and salmon, which is below the global average of 45 pounds and far less than some European countries at around 90 pounds or Iceland's leading 200 pounds. Disguising seafood to appeal to Americans isn't entirely new, citing examples like frozen fish sticks and McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. However, not everyone thinks covert crustaceans are a good thing.
Niaz Dorry, coordinating director of the North American Marine Alliance, advocates for eating fish that looks like fish, arguing that the likelihood that fish came from a community-based, scale-appropriate entity is much higher if it still looks like what it was when swimming in the water. Dorry also advises avoiding factory scale and fake seafood. The pivot to stealthy seafood comes at a critical time for the industry, as the only real growth in seafood sales has come from the sushi counter.