This Industry Voices edition features insights from Pablo Múgica, CEO of FRIME.
1. Captain Fresh has built significant positions in shrimp and salmon, and with the acquisition of Frime, tuna has now become a third strategic pillar. Why tuna — and why now? What makes the category particularly attractive from a long-term investment perspective?
Bringing shrimp, salmon and tuna onto one platform creates a strategic flywheel across markets, customers and categories.
Prior to Frime, Captain Fresh had built a strong market presence in crustaceans through CenSea, Ocean Garden Products, Senecrus and Ocean Edge, and in salmon through KORAL S.A.
Tuna ranks as the next most significant commercial category after crustaceans and salmon, with broad demand across both retail and foodservice channels.
With Frime, Captain Fresh entered tuna from a leadership position, consistent with its approach in other seafood categories.
What makes this particularly powerful is the strategic flywheel it creates.
Bringing the three largest categories onto one platform transforms our go-to-market strategy. Captain Fresh can scale Frime’s tuna business through our US network while simultaneously introducing the group’s crustacean portfolio — including shrimp and lobster — and salmon products more deeply into Southern Europe.
This multiplies customer share without requiring incremental infrastructure, accelerates product innovation and unlocks synergies across the wider Captain Fresh ecosystem.
2. Frime has built a differentiated position in European yellowfin tuna, particularly through value-added and refrigerated products, product innovation and solutions tailored to retail and foodservice customers. What do you think has made this model successful, and where do you see the next major opportunity for innovation and growth in tuna products?
Frime’s success has been built around aligned talent, customer orientation and an ambition for perfect execution.
Frime’s success comes from the combination of three factors:
Aligned talent, customer orientation and ambition for perfect execution.
Looking ahead, future growth will come from addressing significant unsolved needs that still exist within the seafood industry.
Our approach is to understand those needs deeply and use Frime’s customer-oriented and innovation-driven model to create solutions that can deliver meaningful value.
The opportunity is not simply about launching more products.
It is about identifying where customers still face problems and developing scalable solutions around those needs.
3. Looking specifically at Frime’s next chapter under Captain Fresh, can you give us any indication of the strategic direction ahead? Should we expect expansion into new markets, new product formats, greater penetration of retail and foodservice, or a broader role for Frime within Captain Fresh’s global seafood platform?
The opportunity is to build an ecosystem where tuna, shrimp and salmon businesses reinforce each other through cross-selling.
Captain Fresh Group is now a major player across the shrimp, salmon and tuna categories, with a presence in both Europe and North America and across foodservice and retail.
We are building the ecosystem needed to capture cross-selling synergies between those businesses.
The strategic opportunity is therefore broader than simply growing each company independently.
It is about leveraging the customer relationships, geographical presence, product capabilities and sourcing networks across the group to create additional growth opportunities.
4. Mexico is an important sourcing origin for Frime, including its long-standing relationship with Pesca Azteca. With the EU and Mexico having recently signed their modernised trade agreement, how do you see the relationship between Mexico and Europe evolving for the tuna industry? Could it create new opportunities in sourcing, processing or market access?
Mexico — and specifically PINSA/Pesca Azteca — remains a long-term strategic partner for Frime.
Mexico, and specifically Grupo PINSA / Pesca Azteca, is a long-term strategic partner for Frime.
EU-Mexico bilateral relations are therefore vital for our business, and the recent modernisation of the agreement goes in the right direction.
Strong commercial relations between both regions are important for maintaining competitive and reliable tuna supply chains.
For companies such as Frime, greater stability in the relationship between Mexico and Europe supports long-term sourcing partnerships and creates a stronger framework for future growth.
5. Tuna is a global commodity exposed to raw-material volatility, fishing regulations, currency movements and changing availability across oceans. As Captain Fresh scales in the category, how do you build a sourcing model that remains both competitive and resilient while continuing to meet increasingly demanding sustainability and traceability requirements?
Strong strategic suppliers are essential, but resilience also requires avoiding excessive dependence on a single sourcing region.
The Captain Fresh and Frime model relies on strong and reliable partners that are clearly aligned with our sustainability policies.
Pesca Azteca is a good example of that type of strategic relationship.
However, at the same time, we need to ensure that we have similarly strong partners in different parts of the world so that risk is not fully concentrated in one single source.
A very clear example of this exposure occurred when the European Union banned imports of Mexican tuna in November 2022, with the restriction lasting for approximately twelve months.
Events like this show why sourcing diversification matters.
Long-term strategic partnerships remain fundamental, but a resilient tuna supply chain also requires geographic diversification and the ability to secure reliable raw material from different origins.
6. The seafood industry remains highly fragmented, from fishing and primary processing to distribution and brands. Do you expect the tuna industry to go through a meaningful consolidation cycle over the next decade — and where in the value chain do you see the strongest case for consolidation?
The tuna industry will continue to concentrate over the next decade — both upstream and downstream.
Although the tuna industry is not as fragmented as some other sectors within seafood, it will certainly continue to concentrate over the next decade.
And that consolidation will take place on both sides of the value chain: upstream and downstream.
On the fishing side, access to productive fishing grounds, scale and operational efficiency will increasingly matter.
Further downstream, processing, distribution and commercial platforms will also continue to consolidate as companies look for scale, stronger customer access and broader market coverage.
7. Looking ten years ahead, what will separate the winners from the rest of the global tuna industry? Will competitive advantage come primarily from access to raw material, scale, processing efficiency, product innovation, distribution, brands and technology — or from being able to integrate all of them?
The winning model will depend on where you operate in the value chain. Fishing companies will win through access, scale and efficiency; processors will win by solving customer needs at scale.
The answer depends on which part of the value chain we are talking about.
On the fishing side, there will be winners among companies operating in productive fishing grounds with sufficient scale and highly efficient operations.
On the processing and marketing side, the winners will be the companies that deeply understand customer needs and are capable of finding scalable technological solutions to solve them.
The competitive advantage is therefore not necessarily the same across the entire tuna industry.
For some companies, it will be access to raw material and operational excellence.
For others, it will increasingly come from customer understanding, product development, technology and the ability to turn market needs into scalable solutions.
BIGEYE NEWS · EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVE
The acquisition of Frime highlights a broader shift taking place across the global seafood industry.
Captain Fresh is no longer building isolated positions in individual species.
It is building a multi-category seafood platform around three of the world’s largest seafood segments: shrimp, salmon and tuna.
🌎 Cross-selling across global seafood markets, using existing distribution networks to introduce new categories without replicating infrastructure
🐟 Tuna becoming Captain Fresh’s third strategic pillar alongside shrimp and salmon
🔗 Supply diversification becoming increasingly important as trade measures, regulations and geopolitical events expose the risks of concentrating sourcing in one origin
📈 Further consolidation across the tuna value chain, both upstream in fishing and downstream in processing and distribution
🧠 Customer understanding becoming a core competitive advantage, particularly for processors developing scalable technological and product solutions
🚢 Different winning models emerging across the value chain: fishing companies competing through access, scale and efficiency, while processing and commercial companies compete through innovation and market understanding
What emerges is a clear strategic direction.
The future tuna industry will not be shaped exclusively by who controls the most raw material or operates the largest factories.
Competitive advantage will increasingly depend on the ability to combine reliable sourcing, geographic diversification, operational scale, distribution, innovation and deep customer understanding.
Captain Fresh’s acquisition of Frime is therefore more than an entry into tuna.
It is part of a broader attempt to build an integrated seafood ecosystem capable of moving products, customers and capabilities across categories and continents.