(seafood.com) In Japan, surimi seafood are indispensable products for traditional New Year dishes. End-year surimi product sales remained level in Tokyo helped by consumer trend to eat at home; Osaka region sustained a 10% decline.
Last year, there had been concern over the impact on production, given enormous damage of the giant earthquake and tsunami on northern Tohoku , a major producing area.
In terms of the trend in sales in 2011, sales were kept at the previous year's level in Tokyo and surrounding prefectures.
Manufacturers and wholesalers consider the relatively favorable results were partly due to the consumer trend to eat at home.
Market sources say that sales campaign for surimi products in the end-of-the-year and New Year season went more or less as anticipated.
A wholesaler at Tokyo's Tsukiji Fish Market said: "We had uncertainty over whether we could achieve the results as in the previous year, because of the production cutback by makers in the tsunami-ridden Tohoku area." Actual sales, however, betrayed their bearish outlook.
Sales were especially robust in such areas as Niigata, Odawara and Joban.
Last year end, mass retailers refrained from placing buy orders at one point to cope with loss management, but later they took to active buying from around Christmas to the last day of the year.
The best-selling price zone remained the same as a year earlier but specific products that actually sold well seem to have differed from maker to maker.
A producer observed that it had more-than-anticipated sales of package products probably because younger consumers, who do not have knowledge of cooking, bought them, reflecting the current propensity of refraining from dining out.
In this respect, makers note that they succeeded in developing new consumer brackets.
By contrast, in western Japan region centering on Osaka, sales value shrank about 10% from the previous year, in spite of active sales drive for new products including those for children.
A dealer in the Osaka central wholesale market admitted that the sales environment is still difficult, although earlier there had been an anticipation that sales for use at home would increase last year end.
The principal price zone of kamoboko, a kind of popular surimi product in Japan, stayed at around Y400-500, more or less matching their earlier estimate, although fuel and material costs hiked while raw material prices turned lower.
As in Tokyo region, sales of New Year package products saw smooth performance in the Osaka region.
For other products, sales of Oden pot-cuisine materials for winter season showed a robust growth in December as cold weather set in.