15 July 2010

A Different Route Across the Ocean

Moroccan company hopes to reach U.S. customers with its Norwegian salmon

Chabani Manoubi, left, with colleagues Corinne Freige and Howard Kohn, returned to his native North Africa to produce smoked salmon.

By Jeff Baron
Staff Writer

New York — For some select Norwegian salmon, the journey to American plates will follow an unexpected route through Morocco.

Among the food producers and exporters whose booths lined the aisles of the immense Javits Convention Center in New York City for this summer’s Fancy Food Show was entrepreneur Chabani Manoubi. Born in Tunis, Tunisia, and raised in France, he was an advertising executive in Paris when he and a friend invested in a fish-processing plant in Marrakesh, Morocco.

The business had problems, and although Manoubi’s experience with fish was only in eating it, he saw an opportunity to provide high quality at a relatively low cost. He took over the company and found a Frenchman knowledgeable about the cold-smoking process who could advise him on the intricacies of what equipment to buy and what to do with it. After a year of splitting his time between Paris and Marrakesh, Manoubi, 56, moved to Marrakesh full time in 2008 to run his new enterprise, Pink Salmon. He has 28 workers in Marrakesh, increasing success in marketing salmon for the Middle East and an office opening in Monaco to handle European sales. Now he’s turned to the U.S. market.

A Pink Salmon worker slices the smoked Norwegian salmon at the company's plant in Marrakesh, Morocco.

Howard B. Kohn, a veteran of the food business who has signed on as Pink Salmon USA’s director of sales, said what sets this salmon apart is quality. The farm-raised Norwegian salmon is shipped to Marrakesh, salted by hand, cold smoked over natural beechwood and “sliced by hand, the old-fashioned way,” he said. “Many salmon products today no longer go through the hand slicing.” The differences are subtle but important, he said: Machines cannot cut the salmon as thin, and in many cases, the fish must be frozen so that it’s firm enough to go through the slicer.

“The salmon that we have, the Pink Salmon, is never frozen. It’s fresh from the beginning of the process to the time it gets to you, the consumer,” and is kept refrigerated throughout processing and distribution, Kohn said.

The plan in the United States, Kohn said, is the same as has worked in Europe and the Middle East: distribution to fine restaurants and hotels, to high-end shops that sell hand-sliced smoked salmon and to large retail chains. “We’re extremely competitively priced,” he said.

The Fancy Food Show marked Pink Salmon’s U.S. debut, and prospective buyers had an “extremely favorable” reaction to it, Kohn said. “They love not only the initial taste of it but also the finishing taste of it. They comment it’s not too smoky, they comment it’s not too salty, they comment it’s not too oily and they comment it’s a product they could use in their establishments.”

Kohn said that he had work waiting for him after the show, with 400 to 500 retailers, restaurant owners and caterers who tasted the fish and have asked him to contact them about possible orders. He also had lined up storage space and planned for initial marketing in the New York, Boston, Chicago and Miami areas. Based on the positive reaction to the fish, he planned to have an initial supply shipped to the United States within days of the show’s end.

“It takes a week or less from the time the fish is coming out of Norway to the time it’s delivered here in the States,” Kohn said. “What we’re highly recommending to the retailers is they never freeze it. We are sending the fish fresh; we would like the fish to get out fresh to the consumer.”

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)