ROMANIA
Lack of fishing capacity prevents Romania from utilising its rapana quota
Processing rapana for Korean buyers The veined rapa whelk (Rapana venosa) is an invasive species of gastropod native to the western Pacific and now widespread in the Black Sea. The animal is carnivorous feeding on other molluscs and is known to be very resilient tolerating a range of temperatures, salinities, oxygen levels and pollution.
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n Turkey, Bulgaria, and most recently Romania, rapana is a resource that is collected, processed and exported typically to South Korea and Japan. Romania has a quota of 5,000 tonnes of the snail, which it has so far not been able to fish completely, partly due to a lack of fishing capacity. It was only a couple of years ago that the rules on fishing for rapana were changed to allow vessels to dredge for the snail, until then it was only permitted to dive for it. Patrician, a family-owned company, started in 2010 by training divers to collect the rapana which was then sold to the only factory processing rapana at the time. In 2012 however the processing factory went bankrupt placing the owners of Patrician in a dilemma. Alina Constantinescu and her husband Cosac Danut Laurentiu had to take a major decision. Should they drop the rapana business entirely or should they start their own processing operation?
Rapana collected by both divers and dredgers With backgrounds far removed from the seafood processing business (she is an engineer, he a former paratrooper) it was not an easy decision. After serious deliberation however they decided to take the risk and 46
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establish a processing facility for topshell with an annual processing capacity of 500 tonnes of raw material. Initially the company continued with both sides of the business – collecting the rapana and processing it. But, says Ms Constantinescu, it started to become increasingly difficult to manage the divers, vessels, and the processing. Finally the company decided to pull out of having its own supply of the raw material electing instead to get it from the market. Although it prefers a sandy bottom, the veined rapa whelk is also found on the stony seabed seen in the southern part of the Romanian coast. Here the resource is collected by divers, while in the north, where the bottom is sandy, it is fished with dredgers. At the processing facility the rapana is first placed in fresh water for a couple of hours to remove the sand. They are then boiled at 100 degrees for a few minutes and immediately afterwards immersed in very cold water. The thermal shock helps to separate the meat from the shell. The meat is then removed from the shell manually, cleaned and graded into one of six sizes before being frozen. The frozen meat is finally packed and shipped to the company’s customer in Korea. The company has also exported small quantities of the product
At their factory Cosac Danut Laurentiu and Alina Constantinescu process veined rapa whelk for export to Korea.
to Germany, where too it is used by the Korean community. Japan also has a market for rapana, and a potential Japanese buyer has requested Patrician to carry out some special microbiological analyses. One of these in fact
could not be done in Romania at all, so the sample had to be sent to Japan. All the tests showed that the product was excellent and Patrician is hoping to start exporting to Japan in the near future.
Patrician ltd 326 Pantelimon Sos Sector 2, Bucharest Romania Tel./Fax: +40 21 2553513 office@patrician.ro www.topshell.ro
CEO: Alina Constantinescu Managing partner: Cosac Danut Laurentiu Activity: Veined rapa whelk processing Product: Frozen veined rapa whelk graded in six sizes Market: South Korea www.eurofishmagazine.com
02/12/15 10:56 PM