New tuna fillet product

Ever wonder what Charlie Tuna's counterpart in the salmon industry would be called? The Happy Humpy? No, that's a bar somewhere I think. Erik the Red? That might not go over in a former communist country. I don't know if that approach even works anymore. But never-the-less, Starkist has just announced that they are making a cooked-in-the-pouch fillet of tuna.

This picture is of sockeye chunks marinading in preparation for smoking.

They are saying that the fillet is grilled, marinated then glazed. I'm sure they are going to soak the fillets in a marinade overnight like making Korean Chicken, not. Or send the tuna to China to a plant with ten thousand little grills and a lot of Chinese to flip the fillets and keep basting them with a glaze.

Try painting on grill marks. And a flavored dye to look like marinade. Then squirt a little sauce in for a glaze before retorting. Well, however they do it, they already made my mouth water and primed me to buy a fillet to slap on a sandwich. Even though the Starkist PR people mentioned grilling-before-marinading, the effect is the same.

I saw some Atlantic salmon chunks, IQF, in a large plastic bag at COSTCO today in Medford. Those hummers are all ready to pickle, kipper, make chowder, grill, or do any number of things, with much of the fish handling work done already. I think that's cool.

Every one of these products, in my mind anyway, should have a counterpart product using wild salmon. Does it just take too long to develop a product in Alaska? How difficult is it really to do value added processing in Alaska? What industry sector wants to do it and what sector doesn't want to? The why's and why not's are really immaterial. It's not my job to offer solutions. Just a little food for thought; seafood of course.