‘Delacata’ called boon for catfish industry
Posted on Saturday, February 2, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Business/215553/
HOT SPRINGS — Delacata, a new, premium catfish fillet, will provide a struggling industry with a much needed boost, according to those in attendance Friday at the 2008 Catfish Farmers of Arkansas convention.
“We think that this could be the most significant thing to happen to the industry ever,” said Jack Garner, president of The Ramey Agency LLC, a Jackson, Miss.-based advertising and public-relations firm.
Ramey has been working on delacata (pronounced della-COT-ah ) for three years. The Catfish Institute, an industry trade group based in Jackson, and Viking Range Corp., a Greenwood, Miss.-based company that manufactures commercial-grade appliances for the home, worked with Ramey on the fillet. The delacata standards should be ready later this month, when the Catfish Farmers of America holds its annual convention in San Diego, said Carole Engle, director of the Aquaculture / Fisheries Center at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. Farmers and processors could then sign on to produce delacata and “move this forward into the marketplace,” she said.
Garner said, “The idea was never to replace U. S. farmraised catfish or replace the name ‘catfish’ but to create a product that would not be a commodity product — completely price-driven, that could be served at white-tablecloth restaurants and that could be sold for $ 20 an entree, rather than $ 9 an entree.” The new product is a “deepskinned” catfish fillet, Garner said.
“It’s basically just processed twice” to remove the gray filament that can appear on catfish fillets, he said.
Another difference, Engle said, is that delacata fillets average 5 to 7 ounces, compared with 3 to 5 ounces for traditional catfish fillets.
“I’ve thought for a long time that this industry could differentiate its product and have a filet mignon of catfish,” Engle said.
“We don’t have one kind of beef that we all buy. We have lots of different kinds of beef products, and we pay more — and enjoy paying more — for certain kinds of beef products,” she said.
“That’s what this industry is doing, and I think it’s very, very exciting.”
The U. S. catfish industry is wrestling with escalating feed and energy costs, declining prices and stiff import competition.
The new product is designed to “make more money for everybody related to the U. S. catfish industry, from the farmer to the processor to the restaurateur,” Garner said.
Engle serves on an eightmember committee — four catfish farmers and four catfish scientists from Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi — that is developing a set of quality standards that will dictate how delacata must be produced and processed. Antibiotics, for example, would be banned in delacata production and specially formulated feeds would be required to produce lean fish, she said.
Most of the marketing work involved with the introduction of delacata already has been completed, Garner said.
Fish with an unpleasant name — “and to many people ‘catfish’ is an unpleasant name” — can never hope to fetch $ 20 per entree, he said.
Delacata — a merger of the words “Delta” and “catfish” — “had a pleasant sound, so we trademarked it,” Garner said.
Name changes are nothing new in the world of fish, he said.
Patagonian toothfish was renamed Chilean sea bass, slime head became orange roughy, and Mediterranean sea bass was christened bronzini, Garner said.
To date, delacata has been test-marketed in a number of high-end restaurants including Giardina’s in Greenwood, Miss.; Bistro Aix in Jacksonville, Fla.; onboard small, luxury Silversea cruise ships; Go Fish in St. Helena, Calif.; and Johnny’s Half Shell in Washington, D. C., where the fish was offered as a specially processed type of catfish, he said.
“Delacata has consistently been received positively by both consumers and restaurants and deserves to compete with other premium quality fish served in upscale venues,” Garner said.