Send it Back Stu
Send-It-Back Stu: How we maintain quality when sourcing fish
Many of you have complimented our fish quality and have heard me say that "I annoy a lot of people to make that happen." It's true, I have been dumped as a customer for being a pain in the butt more than once. I've gone on before about my love of our packaging materials for preserving fish quality, but there is an important step before that.
Fun fact; the nickname came about for sending back restaurant dishes but it's been far eclipsed by my sending back of vendor product.
Overall, it's important to note that we buy from purveyors/dealers. They are processors/distributors that buy fish among the following ways: directly from fishermen, off of a fish auction and/or from a separate fish dealer that buys fish directly from boats.
Why can't we buy directly from fishermen?
We (Fearless Fish) are looking for 10lbs - 20lbs of a unique variety of top-quality fish (mostly fillets) on any given day. Fishermen can come back from a trip with 100lb - 10,000lbs of fish a day (depending on boat size) and it is often nearly all the same species. This alone doesn't make any sense for us, not to mention that we would have to run down to the dock at any given moment when a boat decided to come back in.
The next issue would be processing this fish. Can we fillet fish? Yes. Are we set up to knock out 200 - 300lbs of whole fish to get 100lbs - 150lbs of fillet to open at 10:30am? No. We trust our purveyors to buy/pick top quality whole fish and then fillet it at an efficiency and quality level higher than what we can do in the shop. Ultimately, this means that the fish costs less (at a higher quality level) when we have our purveyors fillet it because they are better equipped to do so - not only with equipment (tables, scaling machines, skinning machines), but also with an army of experienced filleters.
Thus, buying fish is a big deal. My approach boils down to a few key tenants:
Find the purveyor that offers the best quality of a certain item
If two purveyors offer similar quality, go with the better price
Work with purveyors who will stand behind their product (meaning, if I have a quality issue, they will take back the product)
So what does this look like? This means we have 11 different suppliers just to fill the fish case. When you take into account all the products in the display freezers, display refrigerator and dry goods shelf, it's over 30. For some perspective, prior to opening Fearless Fish, I worked for a fish distributor for years and we sold to some very big name grocery stores. Those stores often use one or two purveyors to cover all their needs. So what? I am a major advocate of focus. I find that the best results come from companies/suppliers that focus on doing a few things very well. So what we buy from who, matters.
Secondly, there are different quality levels of the same item at a any given purveyor, meaning that even if two businesses buy from the same purveyor, they could be getting very different things. Take the company we buy salmon from (Foley Fish) for example. They carry the Bay of Fundy Atlantic Salmon that is raised with clean, environmentally low impact, good husbandry practices - that is also DELICIOUS. They also carry Chilean salmon that costs much less per pound and is raised with none of those things. Simple - we buy the Bay of Fundy fish, it is better.
After determining that a purveyor generally meets our quality standards there are, without exception, times when we will be sent fish that does not meet our quality standards and we cannot sell it. This means that we will either return it or ask the purveyor to simply take it off of our invoice hence - "Send It Back Stu." . The issue here is that there is a balance. If this occurs frequently, the vendor is likely not the right fit. However, if the vendor is good and we have unrealistic expectations, they will dump us.
Overall, the vendor relationships we've cultivated are great and our suppliers know what we are looking for. Note that this has taken years and we continuously strive to find the best fish at the best value. Here is a text exchange with a vendor that is not willing to send me fluke and bass because the quality does not meet our standards:
Sometimes, we get in fish that is not bad enough to send back because doing so may result in the vendor throwing in the towel on us, but it's not good enough for us to put out in the case. I estimate we eat about 3% - 5% in costs in fish we can't send back and can't use (that's not an insignificant amount). However, this is the balance we have to strike. It causes me physical pain to hear when a customer has a bad experience with our fish, so we will continue to apply this and other (often costly) methods to create the best environment to provide you with the best fish possible, every week. And if you ever do have an issue, please tell us. We will make it right.
To recap, humbly:
