News of COVID-19 being discovered on a raw salmon chopping board in Beijing's Xifandi market is looking increasingly bad for salmon exporters, with food scares historically having a lasting impact on Chinese consumer markets, Rabobank China's Consumer Foods Analyst Michelle Huang told IntraFish.

"Salmon exporters need to prepare for a hard time," said Huang, who thinks it unlikely that consumer perceptions around imported salmon are likely to improve within the next six months, at the very least. "Generally speaking a food scandal usually takes years to stop having influence."

Despite scientific evidence that fish cannot carry coronaviruses, consumers in China will now be worried about the safety of the supply chain, said Huang, particularly when it comes to sashimi products, which until now were a rapidly growing sector of Chinese seafood consumption.

Huang herself has stopped eating salmon, and an ad hoc survey of parents around her in Shanghai revealed that all have at least stopped serving salmon to their children, which Chinese middle-class parents tend to do weekly in cooked format.

"I believe that salmon itself is not the virus carrier, but the psychology is different, and now I feel unsafe eating it," said Huang, pointing to consumer inability to subconsciously separate an incident of risk from the associated food, despite reassurance.

A vast array of proteins to choose from

A huge seafood consuming nation, Chinese consumers also have choices and as salmon loses its sheen of nutrition and safety, they are likely to turn back to locally produced wild-caught fish and other proteins that they understand the provenance of, said Huang.

"When an incident like this happens, it is easy to avoid imported seafood like salmon and cod," said Huang, who believes the disaster will also affect other imported seafood products, especially in the sashimi arena.

What makes it harder for the salmon industry to navigate is that imported food scares in China are few and far between. Huang's only relatable incident is the effect that a 2018 dietary supplement incident had on the Chinese consumer market.

The supplement was not imported, but a toddler died and it blew apart the burgeoning direct-selling channel of the entire segment. At the time, Rabobank predicted the impact to last 2-3 years, but ironically, the pandemic and the focus on health has accelerated recovery.

So, can anything be done to save the imported salmon market?

"Increased product traceability," said Huang. "Anything that can be done to show consumers the process, the route to market will improve chances of recovery."

But this will still make little difference in the short term, and exporters should prepare for a long haul if they are focused on future growth in the market.

Analysis

Why salmon exporters should be worried about China linking salmon and COVID-19