Country Calendar, the longrunning national television programme, spent a week wading through Otago's mudflats last September as it profiled Southern Clams. The show documented the company's unique harvest of Tuangi, a little-neck clam colloquially known as a cockle.
Southern Clams managing director Roger Belton sees the timing as appropriate. After decades of quietly building up the industry, Mr Belton believes Southern Clams has finally come of age.
For the past 25 years, the company has pioneered Otago clam harvesting, as the only business in the region with a commercial clam fishing licence.
DCC business development adviser Ross Grey said the company had carved out niche markets overseas, and ‘‘become a thriving business that Dunedin can be proud of.''
‘‘It's good to get a local company recognised and profiled like that on national TV, especially on such an iconic television programme,'' Mr Grey said.
With the support of the Dunedin City Council, Mr Belton said the business had great marketing success overseas, where the common Otago clam was in high demand as an exotic delicacy.
Belton said the clam was largely absent from New Zealand cuisine. As a result, the company exported nearly 90 per cent of its harvest abroad to markets across Europe and North America.
Ironically, Mr Belton saw New Zealand as the last untapped market for Otago's clams.
‘‘We're about where mussels were 30 years ago,'' he said.
Belton said he was keen for New Zealanders to realise what a fantastic resource they had, and asked, ‘‘why is it all being shipped overseas?''
He said the episode of Country Calendar, which aired last month on TV One, was a great opportunity to express that and ‘‘celebrate what we've got in New Zealand.''
After 25 years, he had finally managed to get Otago clams in domestic supermarkets. Since this recent development, Mr Belton saw domestic trade increase from 10 to 15 per cent. Southern Clams was also in early talks with Zest Food Tours, which hoped to market Dunedin food tours to cruise ships, conferences and independent travellers.
‘‘It's very distinctly Dunedin,'' Mr Belton said of Otago's cockles.
‘‘What we've got going, it's not going on anywhere else in the country.''
Mr Belton believed Dunedin's supply of clams was the biggest and most robust in the country.
Dunedin was to clams as Bluff was to oysters, he said.
Mr Belton said the results from the last resource survey in December ‘‘clearly indicated the (shellfish) biomass is virtually the same as it was 25 years ago''.
The estimated biomass for Waitati Inlet was 11,948 tonnes. In 1984, it was 12,080 tonnes. A National Institute for Water & Atmospheric Research survey in 1998 indicated Otago Harbour contained four or five times that figure.
Mr Belton said locals were still frightened about the sustainability of clam harvesting since they cannot see the resource, and it was difficult to picture its enormity.
The biomass in Waitati Inlet was comparable to a quarter million sheep on a 625ha inlet, he said.
‘‘You have to talk sheep, because people don't understand shellfish.''
