Ocean Cuisine is a new name for the U.S. division of Fishery Products International, Ltd., headquartered in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Along with the new name, Ocean Cuisine has a new approach to its expansive line of value-added seafood products called “culinology.”
It’s a three-stage process for creating a new product: culinary development, technical research and development, and process development. Culinology is a new term spawned in the food industry to explain the melding of food science and culinary science.
Mike Sirois, vice president of technical services, has been with FPI/Ocean Cuisine for 18 years and now oversees the culinology process. Before joining FPI, Sirois, a Maine native, co-founded Horton’s Smoked Seafood in 1984. Two years ago, Horton’s was sold to a Canadian company. “We always relied on food science,” said Sirois, himself a food scientist, “but with the [cable TV] Food Channel, people’s awareness of culinary information has gone way, way up. It’s raised the bar for us.”
To raise its own bar, Ocean Cuisine hired Brian Halloran two years ago as corporate executive chef, added a sous-chef and built a culinary center, with a kitchen where Halloran can develop recipes and work with visiting chefs from retail or food service outlets.
Culinology
“First we go to Brian for the `gold standard,’ ” said Sirois. “We want him to be a chef in a white tablecloth restaurant and make the recipe as good as he can make it.”
Halloran develops a new recipe, using the same equipment in his kitchen that various types of restaurants use to prepare food. He works with a microwave, flat grill, conventional oven, convection oven and a “cheese melter” or broiler. Next, his recipe goes to the technologists, who try to stick to the original as closely as possible, but may have to substitute some ingredients that don’t work for mass production. For the third and final step, process development engineers take the revamped recipe and try to make it work for manufacturing. “It boils down to `How good can you make it in the shortest amount of time?’ ” said Sirois.
The time involved can range from six months to a year and a half. Ocean Cuisine’s new “UpperCrust” line required the longer timeline for development. If products are being developed for specific retail or food service customers, “We’re working on their timeline. We go back and forth, back and forth — sometimes it’s on the fast track, but chains are usually working on menus for next year,” said Sirois.
None of these three steps is taken in a vacuum, however. While Halloran is creating, the technologists are looking over his shoulder, commenting on whether certain ingredients or cooking steps will work. Process team members are also looking on, to see if plant equipment can handle the ingredients or the method required to produce the desired result, or if modifications to the equipment are needed or workable. “We stand shoulder to shoulder as I cook,” said Halloran. “And someone might say something like `replace the egg whites with powered egg white solids,’ and Bob [Saville] decides which equipment we need to use to match the hand motions. Then there are not so many surprises when we try the finished product under foodservice kitchen conditions.
“If the steps are difficult to replicate on a 30,000 run, we will work backward. That’s how we work as a team to develop products,” said Halloran. “We all have veto power in the three categories, so everyone must be in agreement on the final product — one has to be a very patient chef to work with all these scientists!” Halloran quipped.
A culinology success story is Ocean Cuisine’s “UpperCrust” line of products. This line of 5-oz. or 6-oz. natural cut fillets with “trendy” crusts on one side only — a difficult concept for mass production — features tilapia, salmon and cod with Mediterranean, Latin, Asian and regional American flavors.
“We thought we couldn’t make the crust work,” said Robert J. Saville, director of process development. “Brian was doing a crust on one side and frying it. But it was 80 percent there, and we tweaked it and it worked.” Ocean Cuisine says the launch last year was the company’s most successful for a foodservice product in 10 years.
New products
In January, Ocean Cuisine launched eight new products, all of which will be featured at the International Boston Seafood Show In March. Two of the products are additions to the UpperCrust line, each a new flavor and a new species: Caribbean Crusted Snapper and Corn Bread Jalepeno-Crusted Catfish. But culinology has also produced an entirely new line of six value-added shrimp products, called Tiki Island Shrimp. Three of the products are Sugar Cane Shrimp Skewers. The skewers are made from real sugar cane fashioned into the shape of an oar for easy handling. The shrimp are glazed with flavors such as Rum Lime and Island Spice. The other three are Tropical Fruit Breaded Shrimp, which combine the shrimp with real tropical fruit such as Papaya Coconut, Mango Ginger and Pineapple Orange.
The company
Once FPI — in Newfoundland and the U.S. — depended largely on products available from fisheries in Eastern Canada or New England, but with diminished stocks in New England and the collapse of Canadian cod stocks a dozen years ago, the company had to change course. Like other processors, FPI began sourcing product worldwide.
“”When the Atlantic cod resource collapsed, a lot of people wrote us off. But we immediately went global. First we brought in our traditional species, cod, for the Newfoundland plants because we weren’t catching it,” said Sirois. “Then we increased our species. Now we procure seafood in 35 countries. We’re in the top three of shrimp importers in North America. You’d be hard-pressed to find a species of seafood we don’t use.
“When the collapse happened, we had already tied our boats up before the moratorium,” Sirois added. “Seafood companies don’t want to empty the oceans, because they don’t want to go out of business.” FPI laid off 6,000 employees the day the fishery was shut down. Now Ocean Cuisine employs 500 people, with 150 in management. The entire company employs more than 3,000. FPI had sales of $300 million (Canadian) at the time of the cod collapse in 1992. Despite a loss of more than $28 million soon after the collapse, innovative sourcing and marketing efforts built sales up to $700 million within a few years. Then management of the company changed when a new board of directors was elected. “The old guard built the company up to where it was attractive to other people. We are grateful for what they did for us,” said Sirois. “It’s a new chapter now, with a lot of new investment and new folks. They’ve given me everything I’ve asked for” including a new lab, the culinary kitchen and “the green light to hire a chef.”
Kevin B. Murphy was appointed executive vice president of FPI Ltd. and chief operating officer of the marketing and value added group, now Ocean Cuisine, in February 2002. Before that, Murphy was president and Chief Operating Officer of Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc. Ocean Cuisine operates in a state-of-the art, two-acre building in a Danvers, MA, industrial park, where “we probably handle more species than anyone,” said Sirois. “Ocean Cuisine has been built up as a go-to-market strategy for seafood.”