LOCAL fast-food restaurants are still unable to source home-grown tilapia, of which a shortage was triggered five years ago when Jamaica Broilers stopped supplying the industry.

Broilers in 2006 stopped supplying the fish product to the local fast-food industry to free up capacity to launch an aggressive increase in distribution of the product to the US market.

While the move was aimed at earning Broilers increased margins from its fish operations, chalking up a loss at the time, it forced fast-food operations or quick service restaurants (QSRs), as they are called, to hastily seek overseas suppliers of the product to fill the void.

But at least one of Broilers’ former clients is still faced with the daunting challenge of sourcing the fish.

On a trip to Island Grill these days, one can’t help but notice that there is sometimes a tape over a couple of the fish offerings on the restaurant’s menu board, signalling the products’ unavailability.

“Ever since Jamaica Broilers (stopped supplying) we have never been able to get the adequate supply that we need to satisfy our customers,” Island Grill CEO Thalia Lyn told Sunday Finance last week.

The main fish product of contention for Island Grill is the deboned whole tilapia.

“We have fish sandwiches and that is going quite well but we were the only QSR chain that had a whole fish on the menu and it is very popular,” said Lyn, noting that “we cannot get adequate supply at the price point that will satisfy our customers… we get it in bits and pieces from the suppliers but not enough to satisfy demand.”

Lyn ruled out using the imported tilapia — used by other members of the fast-food industry for fish fillet — because it depends heavily on the specific taste profile of the local produce.

“The flavour profile of the imported fish is just not the same as the flavour profile for our local fish,” explained Lyn.

However, an industry source told Sunday Finance that a major problem for Island Grill is that, because it offers a deboned tilapia, it needs extremely fresh produce, said to be essential for deboning. One cannot import deboned tilapia, said the source.

Lyn said the reason why the restaurant’s fish shortage is so pronounced right now is because of Lent, a season when demand is traditionally high.

“Really and truly, it’s Lent and people are looking for fish… most of the customer comments that we are getting right now has to do with ‘where is the fish?’,” she said.

Other major local QSRs that were supplied with fish by Broilers were Burger King, Wendy’s and Tastee.

Wendy’s has since found an overseas supplier to replace the void.

“We used to have that problem (of sourcing fish) but we don’t anymore,” noted William Mahfood, managing director of Wisynco, owners of the Wendy’s franchise in Jamaica.

Sunday Finance was unable to get a comment from either Burger King or Tastee up to press time, but both franchises had been searching for an overseas supplier after Broiler’s exit.

Tilapia, a fresh water habitant, is the premium farm grown fish in Jamaica.

The island’s other major producer of farm grown fish — Longville Park Fish Farm in Clarendon — had said, at the time of Broiler’s exit, that it needed at least a year to begin producing enough fish so as to be able to satisfy the market. However, according to Longville Park principal Donnie Bunting, a confluence of challenges since then has in fact crippled farmers in the industry.

Among the challenges are high production costs, competition from cheaper Chinese imports and theft, explained Bunting.

On one hand, Bunting said that the combination of the high cost of production in Jamaica and cheaper Chinese imports forced local tilapia farmers to operate on margins way below the cost of production.

“The product has been underpriced for years and the farmers eventually crumbled,” noted Bunting.

“Imports from China came in at lower prices than the cost of production in Jamaica and that was used to price the fish, so the farmers crumbled after years of unfair pressure,” he explained, adding “of all the serious competitors we have in tilapia, we pay twice the price for electricity than the next closest competitor.”

On the other hand, Bunting said that some 70 per cent of his produce is lost to theft — by both humans and animals.

“For every 100 fish that leaves my factory, only 30 of them reaches the market… And I have serious security on my farm,” said Bunting.

He added: “The 70 per cent is not totally lost to human predators, we have a tremendous problem with crocodiles, that are protected and predatory birds.”

Bunting’s Longville Park farm is sprawled across 200 acres of land straddling the parishes of Clarendon and St Catherine. It once produced 60 tonnes (120,000 pounds) of red tilapia each month. But, according to

Bunting, he is only selling six tonnes a month nowadays.

“Two years ago I was selling 10 times more fish than I am selling now,” Bunting argued.

In fact, Longville Park was forced to close its processing facilities and lay off 25 employees two years ago because of cash flow problems.

“Everybody’s production (of tilapia) just gradually shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and until now a major shortage has been created on the market… over the last few weeks the prices have just about doubled because everybody has virtually brought their production to a bare minimum,” Bunting explained.

The Longville Park proprietor also said that Government was at fault for some of the failures of the local tilapia farming industry by not protecting it from the cheaper imports that he said have flooded the market, and by not aggressively encouraging consumption by the general local market.

“I suppose our Government just didn’t have any interest in the industry,” Bunting said.

“There has been no programme to encourage local consumption of tilapia unlike two of our neighbours — Cuba and Mexico… They are the two most successful countries in the Western Hemisphere in growing tilapias because 90 per cent of their production is consumed locally.”

The upshot, Bunting said, is that he plans to move into the imported segment of the tilapia market.

“That’s what the powers to be seem to support, so I’ll join the importers,” Bunting announced.