It's no secret that canned tuna hasn't seen a real growth in the United States in the past decade -- so Bumble Bee Foods, one of the top three US tuna brands, wanted to be proactive.

"We really stepped back and said 'Where does Bumble Bee go, where does the brand resonate?,'" CEO Chris Lischewski told IntraFish. "Where can Bumble Bee grow, where is there an opportunity?"

The executive said the company did "a level of research we've never done before," and saw a light at the end of the tunnel: High-quality frozen seafood.

Many of the 28,000 consumers Bumble Bee questioned could name certain frozen seafood brands, but they were generally "breaded, lower-value" brands.

"Nobody could name a brand of high-quality frozen seafood," he said.

Paired with the fact that Americans are still shy to cook seafood at home, due mostly to lack of knowledge on how to cook it and the messy clean up afterward, Lischewski said Bumble Bee found its niche and launched its SuperFresh line.

The CEO speaks passionately about SuperFresh, a once-frozen, all-natural line with no colorings, no preservatives and five to eight ingredients, each ones "you would have in your kitchen."

The line was launched in the US Northeast with salmon, tilapia and shrimp in a pouch with parchment paper, ready to cook in six minutes for the shrimp and about 20 for the fish.

Lischewski believes in the product so much, he had his own family taste-test it; it was approved by both his wife and his six-year-old son.

"That's a good signal," he said.

Bumble Bee sources SuperFresh's salmon from Chile, shrimp from Thailand and tilapia from Indonesia, he said.

As for the whopping $25 million (€19 million) spent to advertise this new line, which Lischewski hopes to expand to elsewhere in the United States by the start of 2014, he said Bumble Bee is "really going gangbusters" with the marketing campaign.

"Our goal with this product is to ensure the consumer pulls it from the store shelves," he said. "If we get into the mode of heavy discounting [such as canned tuna], it probably won't do well."

It's not cheap for a frozen product -- the tilapia will retail at $8.99 (€6.90) for two 4.3oz servings and the salmon and shrimp at $9.99 (€7.70) -- but "our whole goal is to drive consumer awareness and bring the consumer to the product." Lischewski said he expects to break even in the second year and thinks the product line "has the potential to achieve $100 million (€76.8 million) in sales over three to five years."

"We hope our launch will be good for the entire [US] frozen seafood category, which is underdeveloped compared to Europe and Asia," Lischewski said.

News

Will US tuna company's gamble pay off?