Crunch decision turned out to be a prawn cracker

the rest of Europe combined. But, as anyone who has tried to buy whole

langoustines or scallops at any of our fishing ports will confirm, these

catches are destined primarily for dining tables in France, Belgium and

Spain.

In Britain, the prawn cocktail offensive has moved far beyond the

Labour Party's assault on the nation's boardrooms. We are all eating

them, apparently, in enormous quantities. But when it comes to more

exotic species, they remain a minority, albeit a growing minority,

taste. Most of us still seem to have problems with any seafood which

retains eyes, bones or an impenetrable shell.

We also, I'm told, persist in associating shellfish with luxury, even

when the numbers suggest otherwise. Despite the growing popularity of

pre-cooked prawns, consumers still rate them a luxury item, a special

treat. Yet, at around #3.49 for a 400g pack, the price is very similar

to a humble piece of chicken filet.

These seem confusing market signals against which to embark on an

ambitious #8.6m investment programme. Especially if you are a private

family business, with no institutional investors, dependent on bank

support to grow. But that is exactly what Alastair Salvesen and his

Dawnfresh Seafoods business did in 1992, when they broke ground on a

former rugby training pitch in Uddingston to build a state-of-the art

processing plant.

The Bothwell Park development has been up and running now for 18

months. Its high risk production hall, where the most scrupulous hygiene

standards are enforced, is capable of producing three tonnes of

peeled-and-cooked cold water prawns every hour.

Next door, in the low risk hall, chilled shellfish deliveries are

received, washed and frozen during the fishing season, stored, and -- as

required by customers throughout the year -- parted from their shells

manually and sent on for further processing. This hall also contains two

coating lines, enabling Dawnfresh to add further value to its raw

material.

''This industry tends to be production-led'' says managing director

John Saunders, ''but we want to be known as a marketing-led, rather than

a production-led operation.'' Dawnfresh has 47 different new products in

various stages of development. Some will inevitably fall by the wayside.

But the aim is introduce one new product every six weeks for the next

eighteen months.

''We will identify the market requirement, the price requirement, and

the customer's margin requirement even before we go into the kitchen to

develop product'' adds Saunders, who joined Dawnfresh in April last

year, after 25 years in other parts of the food processing industry,

latterly with Marshalls, the chicken people.

Alastair Salvesen acquired control of the Dawnfresh business in a 1983

management buy-out, when it was one small part of the Christian Salvesen

empire, known as the South Georgia Company in its old whaling days but,

by then, a force in food storage and distribution, housebuilding, and

assorted other activities like brick making.

As one of the controlling family, he had gone off to Cumbria, to

Whitehaven, where the seafood processing business was then located, to

try and turn round its flagging fortunes. He succeeded. But the

Christian Salvesen board then decided that selling shellfish under its

own brand name, Dawnfresh, wasn't appropriate for a group primarily

interested in storing and distributing food for other people. So

Alastair Salvesen got the opportunity to buy control.

At the time Dawnfresh had an annual turnover of between #2m and #3m.

Three years later, Salvesen reached a crunch decision. ''I came to the

conclusion that we either had to expand considerably or get out of the

business altogether'' he says.

Salvesen surveyed the rest of the marketplace and his eyes alighted on

Starfish, a processor based near Ipswich, which was supplying Marks &

Spencer. A month later he happened to be in Suffolk visiting a Dawnfresh

customer and picked up a rumour Starfish had just been sold. ''We

finished our lunch very quickly, I phoned Starfish and said: I'm coming

over to see you'' he recalls.

The upshot was that Dawnfresh acquired the business and valuable

additional capacity for processing Norwegian prawns. By 1988, Salvesen

had decided he needed to expand Dawnfresh's capacity in its other main

line, scampi. This time his eyes alighted on Mull of Kintyre Seafoods in

Campbeltown.

It was a father and son business and the father, George Mair, was

looking to retire. ''It was another timeous visit'' says Salvesen,

softly. A deal was struck and the son, Michael Mair, like the owner of

Starfish before him, joined the Dawnfresh board. The ex-owner of

Starfish later left to start a mayonnaise business.

The two acquisitions, together with organically-generated growth meant

Dawnfresh was becoming a significantly larger player in its sector. But

the acquisitions also put great strains on the group's senior

management. ''It took five hours to get from Whitehaven to Campbeltown

and a lot more than five hours to get down to Ipswich'' says Salvesen,

recalling regular sorties on the sleeper from Carlisle to London,

sprints up to Suffolk, followed by sleepers back to Cumbria.

In addition, the Ipswich facility, which was leased, was in need of

some serious investment. As the strain of managing three such

geographically dispersed sites grew, Salvesen looked consolidating

everything at Whitehaven. ''But it was the wrong location'' he says now.

''It might have been right when it was a thriving herring port. But most

of the scampi is landed in Scotland now. And Whitehaven was not well

sited on the chilled production line routes.''

The local authority in Whitehaven was not very responsive when

Dawnfresh was looking at the local options. So Salvesen started looking

for a greenfield site elsewhere which made logistical sense -- centrally

sited to receive supplies of scampi from the Scottish ports and imported

cold water prawns, mainly from Iceland, Denmark and Norway, centrally

sited for delivery of the processed product to the major retailers' main

distibution depots.

He looked at Motherwell, attracted by the local food park. But the

sites avaliable there were not quite what he was looking for. Other

Lanarkshire options were also studied and rejected. Then the infant

Lanarkshire Development Agency became involved. Dawnfresh was one of its

very first significant opportunities.

''The LDA found us this site'' says Salvesen. ''We found them very

helpful. They were very reactive and very participative.'' ''This

company has nothing but the highest praise for the LDA'' adds Saunders.

When the Bothwell Park facility opened for business, Ipswich and

Whitehaven closed. A few experienced staff accepted the opportunity to

move north. ''But it was fewer than we would have liked'' adds Salvesen.

''And the numbers have dwindled since.''

That posed a major recruitment and training problem. Bothwell was

built with new, tougher food hygiene regulations firmly at the front of

everyone's mind. Management faced a twin problem. Training staff in the

dextrous manual techniques needed to process shellfish -- the meat is

ejected from the shell by the application of a powerful jet of water,

for example -- had to be a preceded by a campaign to establish, from day

one, a hygiene-conscious culture.

One immediately striking feature of Dawnfresh's Bothwell Park

operation is the high proportion of men on the shelling lines and

elsewhere in the process plant. Women -- witness the electronics sector

-- are widely held to be better and faster at intricate, repetitive

manual tasks. But at Dawnfresh they even had to adapt the changing rooms

as they found a surprisingly high proportion of inexperienced male

recruits took best to the processes.

This may, of course, be a reflection of the huge shake-out in male

manual labour in Lanarkshire following the painful contraction of the

steel and engineering industries. Dawnfresh, which promised 170 jobs

when it opened, is already employing 267, possibly the fastest job build

up in any one company in the area since the Ravenscraig closure.

With Campbetown, where there has been significant investment,

providing front-line processing and supplying export markets with more

exotic shellfish varieties, Dawnfresh Seafoods is now turning over #20m

a year, a near ten-fold increase in a little over ten years. Some of

that growth, of course, has come from acquisitions. But more than half

of it, Salvesen and Saunders reckon, has come from growing their

marketplace.

They face intense price competition, particularly in the supply of

peeled-and-cooked prawns. One major competitor, selling prawns

originating in the Greenland fishery, is a state agency more interested

in supporting the fragile Greenland economy than in making a profit.

''The UK retail trade is one of the most easily penetrable in Europe''

says Saunders, pointing out that the one warehouse, one drop approach of

our supermarket chains is very different from the more complex

distribution channels in Germany or France.

To remain profitable, and able to finance investment on the scale it

has, Dawnfresh has to go on being as efficient and price competitive as

it can be, winning an above-trend share of any market growth. But it is

on more added value products that the really significant advances will,

in future, be won.

''We want to give beef and chicken more competition than they've had

in the past'' says Saunders.