By now, quite a few million people have tasted orange roughy andfound the fish to their liking. But it first surfaced only about adozen years ago and didn't appear on many restaurant menus forseveral years.
Tom Mazzetta, a city planner by education, just might be the manresponsible for the current popularity of orange roughy.
"We are the largest single importer of seafood from NewZealand," he says.
And orange roughy comes from New Zealand. In fact, Mazzettasays, "orange roughy really built my company."
By that he means that the Mazzetta Co., with headquarters inHighland Park, got started in 1987 as an importer of frozen lobstertails and quickly found a market for orange roughy. Early on, itappeared on restaurant menus as "Poor Man's Lobster." Like lobster,the meat is white and tender. Unlike lobster, it was inexpensive.
Mazzetta's timing was right.
"Ten or 12 years ago, the Midwest ate beef," he says. "Now withtravel and increasing interest in a healthful diet, the market forfish is big. Of course, America loves fish as long as it doesn'ttaste like fish, and orange roughy is one of the fishes with a verymild taste."
The fish comes by that strange name naturally. It is a paleorange color and has a very rough skin instead of scales.
"It is a relatively small fish," Massetta says. "It wasn'tfound until very recent years because it lives at great depths offNew Zealand. It is caught a mile or so below the ocean surface inhuge, electronically monitored nets. Perhaps because of the depthsand the cold, it grows very slowly. A two-foot fish may be 25 yearsold."
Supply is the critical factor for seafood, increasingly popularand now sold not only in restaurants and fish markets but also insupermarkets, fresh and frozen and packaged.
A half-dozen years ago, Mazzetta says, when "white cod" from NewEngland waters was in tight supply and before orange roughy wasprominent, some of the fish houses "almost had to shut down" for lackof supplies.
Surprisingly enough, the Mazzetta Co. is by way of being aglobal company and one standout example of the transformation of theMidwest economy from manufaturing to service."We buy dover sole fromHolland, shrimp from Southeast Asia, China and Mexico, scallops fromAustralia, lobster tail from Brazil, and of course orange roughy fromNew Zealand," says Mazzetta, now a seasoned chief executive officerat age 41.
"We have a new fish coming in now. It is called Tilatia. It isanother mild-tasting fish and, like shrimp in Eucador and mussels in New Zealand, it is farm raised. It iscultivated in Thailand and the Singapore area so it is available 52weeks a year."
Farm-raised seafood sounds easy and inexpensive. But there's atleast one emerging problem, Mazzetta says. Land prices are gettingso expensive in appropriate areas of Thailand that costs forfarm-raised fish are increasing.
Mazzetta says he got into the fish business by accident. Whathe means is that by the time he graduated from the University ofIllinois with a degree in city planning he knew he didn't want to bea city planner. The summer he graduated his father, Oswald, sort ofhad the idea his son should do something more than continue to caddyat the Bob-O-Link golf club.
"I guess you'd call it economics," Mazzetta says of his father'seffort to push him out of the house and into some kind of job.Something turned out to be a job in a wholesale seafood company,newly established by a friend of his father's.
It could be said that Mazzetta took to the business like a fishto water. This was 1976.
Ten years later, after switching companies and jobs a fewtimes, Mazzetta knew the business, particularly the import business,and was ready to start his own company, concentrarting on imports.
"My first year we did $25 million in sales," Mazzetta says. "Westarted with restaurants. Now we work with the chains and with foodcompanies selling to the supermarkets. Last year our sales topped$88 million and 28 million pounds. Our goal is an increase everyyear and so far this year we are on track to hit $100 million."
No comments:
Post a Comment