Fishing the Unique

Unique Seafood Group is one of the UK’s main players in the seafood industry, supplying dependable, consistent quality and quantity fish at great value direct from our partner vessels at sea, without any middlemen. They are Unique; a professional and trustworthy supplier, building long-term relationships in the wholesale, industrial, retail and food service sectors in the UK, Europe and further afield - and supplying direct to Britain’s Fish & Chip Shops, Takeaways and Restaurants.

As well as superb seafood they stock a vast choice of leading quality chicken, sausages, burgers, pies, pasties, pancake rolls, buns, baps, breaded and battered foods, plus halal and vegetarian foods.

Recently the best fish and chip shops in the UK visited Norway to take a trip onboard Atlantic, a vessel Unique have a great relationship with and supply chip shops across the UK from. Seafood from Norway organised this visit which was attended by the winning shops from the recent 2023 National Fish & Chip Awards.

Invited to the trip and onboard Atlantic, was Bob Leahy manager of Fish City, Belfast who’s shop won both Restaurant of the Year and the Environment and Sustainability Award at the NFFF ran event. Some of his account onboard the Atlantic is documented below.

We were welcomed by owner Kjell Gunnar Hoddevik, his family and the crew, and shown around the spacious and wellappointed vessel. Unlike coastal fishing boats that set out to sea for up to 24 hours at a time, the Atlantic goes out to sea for a month at a time; and, to keep the workers well fed they maintain a large galley, mess (dining room) and scullery, which surprised me given how tight space can be even in a restaurant (on land!) for all these functions.

Atlantic’s merging of longline fishing with green technologies makes it an innovative, climatefriendly producer of cod and haddock fillets for the UK market, as well as fillets of tusk, ling and saithe for the local Norwegian market and for export.

The Atlantic is by all assessments a floating factory, with many processes across the operation entirely automated, including the sorting, weighting, heading and cleaning of the fish, as well as the packing and processing of the fillets. Its baited 8,000-metre longline consists of 60,000 hooks, of which about 10 percent are serviced by hand each day. Along those thousands of hooks is placed a patent-pending bait product made with locally sourced mackerel.

We learned that when caught, the fish are anaesthetised before being cut and bled by hand, with the recognition that fish are living creatures and should be handled gently and properly. As we took the sea route inland through jaw-droppingly beautiful landscapes in the Fjords, I could not help but appreciate how much work, investment, and ingenuity goes into sourcing the fish we in the UK enjoy at our local chippies and restaurants.

Norway has very strict catch limits, or quotas, that are enforced by the Norwegian Coast Guard. Nearly 70 percent of the Coast Guard’s resources go in to ensuring that fishing activities are in line with Norwegian regulations. Fishing vessels are boarded as often as daily to monitor that their quotas are not exceeded.

Quotas are the subject of continuous research and assessment by regulators, industry representatives and scientists, all with the long-term viability of