Bert Van Loock satisfies entrepreneurial dream with Aquamarine Seafood

Aquamarine Seafood as a company is just six years old, but given its young age, it punches well above its weight in the global seafood industry.

That’s partially because, even though the company is new, its founder and owner, Bert Van Loock, has more than 30 years of industry experience, including 22 years at a trading company and five years as a director of a Belgium-based seafood processor and distributor. He said the experiences were valuable, but ultimately, he decided they were not for him.

“Pure trading companies are very, very price-driven. We would make all this effort to establish our network, audit factories, and work together with good suppliers, and then were frequently forced by our customers to buy from a big category of suppliers” he said. “That's not what I wanted to do.”

Van Loock said over his time in the seafood industry, he began to develop a theory of how he would run his own shop.

“You build up your experience, you see where your value is, where the opportunities are in the market,” Van Loock told SeafoodSource. “I did not want to depend on the decisions of others to make my buying decisions, and basically, I thought the business of trading was getting more and more demanding, with the customer side always requesting more and more in service: whether it was developing brands; creating packaging; or storage, which is basically like offering financing. And the margins were getting tighter. So my conclusion was to focus on very specialized products and to be the best in the market at those.”

In 2017, with a clear vision of how he wanted to operate, he founded the Antwerp, Belgium-headquartered Aquamarine.

“For me, it was very clear – we need to add value to the supply chain. We're not going to bother buying Norwegian salmon to sell it to local distributors because the industry has a representative in Belgium doing the sales. Where we feel that we add value is market knowledge, strict control of specifications and quality, and an offer that stands apart from the everyday products that everyone else has,” Van Loock said. “We have an assortment of niche, high-end products that are maybe not the biggest volumes but that give us our identity.”

Aquamarine Seafood had EUR 14.1 million (USD 14.8 million) in sales in 2022, up from EUR 10.5 million (USD 11.1 million) in 2021. It has grown from two employees to eight.

“We started from scratch, with new suppliers, new customers, and new products; building new brands and setting them up in the market,” Van Loock said. “We import products from all over the world, mostly under our own brands, and we also do private label. But basically, our core business is composing our own assortment of products with our own brands and selling it to the wholesale market and the industry.”

Aquamarine sources products globally, with Vietnam its largest source of product at around 35 percent. Van Loock said 95 percent of its sales are within Europe, with around 70 percent in the Netherlands and Belgium.  Its primary customers are the industry and seafood wholesalers, serving the hotel, restaurant, and catering (HORECA) market, including many white tablecloth restaurants.“We have an assortment of very high-end products like carabineros shrimp; our crab items; and some very specialized items for sushi. This differentiates us from most other seafood companies, which are just focusing on the everyday assortment,” Van Loock said. “We also work a lot on demand. We have some very specialized wholesalers, and with them and their five-star restaurant and hotel clients, they sometimes have very specific, unique demands and we try to accommodate them in getting the product they're looking for.”

Van Loock said he now operates his company “the way I always wanted to.”

“I achieved what I was planning to do,” he said. “For these niche products, we have the network to get what clients want. We have the logistics and facilities to get the product to where the client wants it in fantastic shape. In the back of my head on every transaction, is what is the exchange I’m giving to people for every euro that I ask from them? I need to provide value in return, otherwise, it's just adding cost. That's what we want to avoid. We don't want to be a company that is adding cost but not adding value.”

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Aquamarine Seafood, Van Loock acknowledged. In its first year in business, 2017, the shrimp market crashed and the company was forced to sell at a loss for several months.

“That was not really a fun start,” he said.

The Covid-19 pandemic also hurt the firm. It suffered a down year in 2020 with EUR 6.8 million (USD 7.2 million) in sales, down from EUR 7.2 million (USD 7.6 million) in sales in 2019.

“We were lucky because we had inventory, and with the big shortages during the pandemic, we could make an extra buck because we had what everybody needed,” he said. “But we rely on our personal contacts in so many different countries for our business, and it became more difficult to maintain those relationships without being able to travel. We try to work as direct as possible, avoiding agents and exporters. We have digital communication channels, but face-to-face contact is essential. And that was not possible for a long period of time.”

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Photo courtesy of Aquamarine Seafood