Seafood e-retailer Foodison is partnering with companies including wholesaler Ebisu Shokai and trading houses Ocean Road and Nosui on a trial of one shipping container of unshelled scallops, weighing more than 20 tonnes.

Under the deal, scallops from Ebisu will be purchased by Ocean Road and exported to Vietnam, where they will be processed and sent back to Japan to be sold to restaurants and retailers by Foodison, Ebisu and Nosui.

The newswire revealed that the initial batch has already been sent to Vietnam, where the processing facility will produce half-shell scallops for cooking as well as sushi-grade meat and frozen scallops to be eaten raw.

The seafood companies will consider whether to continue with the deal pending the results of the first batch, said Nikkei.

The labour costs involved in processing are only about 20% to 30% as high in Vietnam as in Japan. For scallops for sushi or raw consumption, the price is expected to come out lower than for Japanese-processed products even after accounting for transportation costs.

Scallops on the half-shell, which need less work, are expected to be priced about the same as their Japanese counterparts. However, manpower is in short supply in Japan, and “it's better to process them overseas and sell them to customers,” said Kenichiro Hoshino, a manager at Foodison cited by Nikkei.

The Vietnamese facilities are HACCP certified -- an international standard for food safety -- and the scallops they produce can be exported to markets besides Japan. Once they establish a track record, the companies will consider selling to Europe and the US as well.

Source: VOV