Gourmet Aquatic Enrolls 12 Tilapia Farms In iBAP
Sunnyvale Seafood, the U.S.-based sales arm for the Goulian Aquatic Group and its affiliated companies, continues to robustly support the Global Aquaculture Alliance’s Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) third-party certification program.
Goulian Aquatic and Gourmet Aquatic are both eligible to supply four-star shrimp and tilapia products. Also, Goulian Aquatic is a diamond sponsor of GAA’s GOAL 2016 conference in Guangzhou, China, from September 19 to 22. Goulian Aquatic celebrates its 15th anniversary this month as one of China’s largest shrimp producers.
Gourmet Aquatic, working in conjunction with BAP, has enrolled 12 tilapia farms in China in the iBAP program, which is a precursor to full BAP certification. This will significantly increase Gourmet Aquatics’ ability to supply four-star tilapia products to international markets. Production from these 12 operations exceeds 14,000 metric tons of fish annually, and, when combined with Gourmet Aquatics’ company-owned hatchery and demonstration farm, that number exceeds 16,000 metric tons (35 million pounds).
“This is just the first step in our efforts to expand our production to all the farms that use our hatchery and feed mill products in China”says Jim Bugbee, VP of market development and global supply chain for Sunnyvale Seafood. “This achievement realized over a very short period of time is a real testament to the hard work by the staff at Gourmet, our hatchery team and farm coordinators who do the hard work in China. We expect further growth in 2017 as the success of this program is realized by the rest of our contract farmers.”
“BAP has provided Goulian and Gourmet with support to build the structure that assures success for the growth of this program for the Goulian Group,” says Kevin Tang, CEO of Sunnyvale Seafood.“The iBAP program helps us drive more business on all of our product from BAP-certified facilities that we import and sell from all over the world. We are working to further expand our four-star supplies on shrimp products from other countries as well as pushing the availability of more four-star tilapia product to meet the growing demand from U.S. retailers and foodservice distributors.”
