ROMANIA
Quality Natural SRL
Traditional trout products with a twist Quality Natural SRL, a Romanian company, has focused on the creation of value-added products based on trout. The company is betting on the increasing popularity of organic foodstuffs with a shift to products based exclusively on organically-farmed trout.
F
armed fish production in Romania is dominated by cyprinids which account for over 80 of the total, but of the other species that are farmed, trout is clearly the leader. Production has increased steadily over the four years to 2016 to reach almost 1,600 tonnes. This is good news for Quality Natural SRL, a company based in the hills of Suceava in northeast Romania, that is focused on processing trout into a series of value added products that stand out for their attractive appearance. The production is sold primarily to domestic customers, but the owner is also searching for export markets and to this end was exhibiting at the recently concluded Anuga trade fair in Cologne, and last year the company was at SIAL in Paris. The company will also visit Seafood Expo Global in Brussels in spring next year.
Reviving old recipes A two-year-old pioneer in the trout processing industry and possibly the only one to focus exclusively on trout products Quality Natural has its own way of doing things. For many of its products the company has resurrected traditional Romanian recipes and added a modern twist. Other recipes are concocted from scratch. The names too reflect the origin of the products as they are often in the local dialect. This not only embeds the product in a regional context giving it a historic and cultural value, but also makes it stand out as something a little different and special. The fish for
the production is sourced from local trout farms, but now one of the farms has secured an organic certification and Quality Natural will gradually source all its raw material from here. This farm is in the neighbouring county where the fish grow in a natural habitat with very good water and the resulting product is of very high quality. The farm is certified by Bio Austria and now the factory at Quality Natural is also seeking organic certification for some of its products. Auditors from Bio Austria have already visited the plant and a decision is pending, says Marius Nastaca, the technical manager. However, the certification will only be valid for some products, not for the entire range.
Sales of organic fish products set to climb Smoked trout and fillet of smoked trout are two of the company’s popular products. The smoked trout is also used to produce a very traditional item where the fish is wrapped in branches of pine that, over the course of a few days, impart their fragrance to the smoked fish. The product originates in this area, says Mr Nastaca, but we only produce small quantities as it is highly labour intensive. Another traditional product is smoked trout in oil. All these products will use organic trout so that the fraction of the total output that is organic will be about 10-15. However, sales of our smoked products are growing faster than sales of our other
Marius Nastaca, quality control manager, and Georgiana Apetroae, production manager, at Quality Natural SRL, a processor of high end trout products.
products, says Mr Nastaca, and if this trend continues then the proportion of organic products will also increase. We see that demand for organic products in general in Romania is increasing, and our organic trout products are following this. Consumers are looking increasingly for products that are healthful for themselves and not harmful for the environment, and organically certified seafood clearly falls into this bracket. In a month we process about 2 tonnes of raw materials, says Georgiana Apetroae, the production manager, which comes either on ice in boxes or also live in tanks with oxygenated water. The latter is more typical in summer when the weather is warm. The live fish are then slaughtered with electricity using a machine that makes the process as quick and painless as possible, before other machines gut and clean the fish. For the
#
moment the guts and other waste products are incinerated, but the company is considering using it instead to make pet food, but has neither the technology nor the infrastructure to do this at the moment. Currently, Quality Natural is part of an EU research project with the university of Suceava that is investigating ways to increase the shelf life of products. Researchers come to the company to take samples and to test their shelf life, which currently range from 35 days to one year. These are smoked products which are used in the manufacture of some of the items packaged in glass jars. These include spreads that use smoked trout meat mixed with different spices and condiments, such as mustard, lemon, horse radish, dill and garlic. However, Mr Nastaca emphasises, nothing in the form of preserving agents apart from common salt is added to the products to give them a longer shelf &VSPl TI .BHB[JOF