Tinned salmon why so expensive ?

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Deleted member 61728

Deleted member 61728

I used to have tinned salmon in my sarnies from time to time which made a change from tuna or ham but now the cost for 1 can of salmon is stupid like 3-5 quid for a mid sized can.Tuna is cheaper but the cost of tinned salmon really has got expensive compared to how much it used to cost.Why is it so much more expensive ?
 
i think it is to do with the farming involved with salmon. also t government restrictions on how much fish can be fished.

simple answer though is .... chicken .... its better :D
 
Glaucus said:
Because its overpriced and fashionable.
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I doubt it. It's most likely because...
edscdk said:
tuna are stolen from the see for free, salmon require money to farm I would assume
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Looking back on it, the salmon industry was one of the first to realise the effects of overfishing and it's heavily farmed now. They are also one of the only fish industries that realises the effects of intense fish farming and the way diseases and parasites propagate in densely populated fish farms. These are all expensive overheads that wild fish do not have.
 
Keep an eye on the special offers at the supermarkets, they frequently have it for half price or under £2.00. I got 6 tins for under £2.00 each at Morrisons last week.
 
edscdk said:
tuna are stolen from the see for free, salmon require money to farm I would assume
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a lot of tinned salmon is labelled as being wild, I use both wild Alaskan and Wild Pacific, no farming costs involved but still damned expensive for the weight of fish you get.
 
Tinned Salmon is mostly caught on the Western (Pacific) shoreline in Alaska and Canada.

From here, it is not farmed, but fished when the Salmon come back to their spawning grounds to lay their eggs before dying. There is no way to tell which fish are going to swim up any river at any given time. IF you haven;t read about the salmon's life cycle look it up - it's quite fascinating.

The process of fishing is policed to an extent - a quota is let through so that the species can spawn to ensure the continuation of the breed, then the fishing can begin.

Fish is caught and then sold. "Fresh stock" fish taken to the nearest processing plant where it is frozen - the stuff for tinning is then taken to tinning plants.

The processing plants are mothballed for all of the year except fishing season. Once the season (June-August) is finished the plants are closed and mothballed again. Fish only come back to breed once per year...

Why so expensive? Wild Pink Salmon is mostly sold for Sushi - Red Salmon is mostly tinned (I think the ration is about 60-70% in both cases)

The product is sold when the processing plants have an idea of what they are going to get - via a form of hedging.

Companies such as John West have representation in Seatle who coordinate the quality assurance of the product, sampling batches of tinned product to select only the very best production batches. These are bought at a premium and then shipped over to the UK in consignments to meet demand. It's cheaper to do this and store it at source than to store in the UK.

Why so expensive -

1. Companies like John West actually do buy best stock. Therefore this carries a premium.
2. Storage - Each seasons catch will need to be stored for up to 11 months. Warehousing costs....
3. Shipping cardboard for packaging, pallets for shipping, and tin cans and salt (the only ingredients in a tin of wild salmon - the fluid is the fishes juices) out to the wilds of Alaska, in the back of beyond, all branded etc costs a fair bit..
4. As does shipping it 1/3rd the way round the world to market. Oil prices are ridiculously high. I've seen presentations recently claiming that half of the cost of a tin of fish is actually the cost to bring it to market.
5. Currency - Salmon is caught and valued in US dollars. European imported must pay for product in Dollars, which means buying currency. This hedging process has costs attached...

Tinned wild salmon is all imported, so, on top of this, you've got the advertising and brand heritage to pay for.
 
Jonny69 said:
I doubt it. It's most likely because...

Looking back on it, the salmon industry was one of the first to realise the effects of overfishing and it's heavily farmed now. They are also one of the only fish industries that realises the effects of intense fish farming and the way diseases and parasites propagate in densely populated fish farms. These are all expensive overheads that wild fish do not have.
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Most tinned Salmon is Wild Salmon, not farmed.
 
The real irony here, if you can call it that is that Most Tinned Salmon is a purely natural, wild animal. However, because of the guidelines around labelling things as organic, and the nature of wild fish (and the fact that no-one still knows where fish go from when they first venture into the sea, until when they return to spawn), no-one can categorically say what they have eaten, therefore no-one can label the wild caught product as Organic, which is the biggest misnomer. Perverse that the only organic salmon product have to be intensive farmed, which is the fish equivalent free range chickens vs wild.

Another great example of labelling madness...
 
I've found that tinned pink salmon is cheaper than red. Can someone explain to me why? My parents always buy red and have done since I was a kid. I've recently started to buy pink off the shelves of bargain stores such as B&M bargains cheap and I can't tell the difference.

Salmon in a sandwich is one of the best things ever imo.

I love all fish though and got told off for microwaving kippers in the work office microwave once for lunch because of the smell.

Ian :-)
 
It's to do with quantities of fish caught and canned.

Red Salmon is a completely different species of salmon to Pink.

Historically more Pink Salmon is canned than Red, therefore more is available - It's a supply and demand thing.
 
lofz said:
I've found that tinned pink salmon is cheaper than red. Can someone explain to me why? My parents always buy red and have done since I was a kid. I've recently started to buy pink off the shelves of bargain stores such as B&M bargains cheap and I can't tell the difference.

Salmon in a sandwich is one of the best things ever imo.

I love all fish though and got told off for microwaving kippers in the work office microwave once for lunch because of the smell.

Ian :-)
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Good on you for eating tinned kippers! I love em, but I'm not as brave as you heating, and eating them at work.

It might stop some people coming into our IT office though, which would be a good thing at month end... :)
 
I was asking as you seem to know a fair bit about tinned sea food. I was hoping you wasn't trying to take my thunder away with me being OcUks resident fish monger..:eek::p
 
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