Research: Customer Contact.

After having a chat with this fish supplier I decided to talk to some of the customers at the fish & chip shop. Customers are after all at the heart of every business so I felt this was important.

I decided to keep the questions short and sweet and ask them while they were waiting for their order. I wanted to find out what their favourite fish was to see if it matched Hugh’s opinion that Brits only like haddock or cod. I also wanted to know what they thought of fish & chips and the fish & chip shop experience, any word that came to mind. I brought with me a black card cut out of a haddock for them to write their answers on and cooked some battered plaice for them to sample. I thought some free food would be a nice thank you for them completing the questions and it would also let me judge some of their responses to a new type of fish.

I found that the majority of the customers I asked preferred haddock, next in line were cod and salmon, only a couple chose different types of fish such as halibut or mackerel. Getting people to try a piece of plaice proved difficult I’m not sure this was because they thought they wouldn’t like it or if they felt to uncomfortable to take a free sample.

I have also drawn up four personas of my regular Wednesday night customers. They all have their rituals and all get the exact same order every week. 

This make me think that it may prove difficult to get people to change their habits and try a new type of fish. So maybe it’s not these customers I should target maybe it will be the more adventurous younger generation who are a bit bored of their local chippy, these may be the customers that will want a shark supper? 

Project Research: Interview with the Fish Supplier.

A few weeks ago now I went to Arbroath to speak to the fish merchant who supplies the fish to my fish & chip shop. I wanted to ask him a few questions about sustainability within fishing and how he feels about fishing quotas. I had a few questions prepared to get the ball rolling but was hoping to have more of a conversation with him and find out some information that would be of relevance that I hadn’t thought of. Luckily it turned out that way!

I started by asking him about the t.v. programme ‘Hugh’s Fish Fight’ and what his opinions were on sustainability. Although he agreed with fishing quotas and the monitoring system in place as it has put a stop to selling ‘Black Fish’, he had a different opinion on what would help sustain the haddock stocks. In his opinion sustainability can be helped if we stopped catching fish when they are spawning. When fish are spawning they become thin and tasteless, the fish should not be caught at this time as they are weak, they need to become strong again before they are caught. Easter is when the haddock that he buys will be spawning therefore Easter is when our shop should stop selling haddock if it were to follow the rule of not catching fish when spawning to help sustainability. This would not go down well with customers as traditionally Easter is a busy time for the fish & chip shop. I wondered if perhaps the chip shop and his fish business could work together and sell a different type of fish to help the cause however he didn’t agree. 95% of the fish he sells is haddock, he said it is very difficult to get people in this area to buy another type of fish. I asked if he could suggest another type of fish we could try to sell instead but he didn’t think this was a good idea. It seems people are set in their ways and it will be a difficult task to change this but I think eventually it could be done. People today are more open to trying new foods, maybe if they knew about the variety of fish and knew what it tasted like they would not be as scared to buy it. Most kids don’t like fish but they will eat it from a fish & chip shop as it’s dressed up differently, maybe adults would be the same if you offered them some halibut served up in a different way they might bite…

In my opinion I feel the key to helping the sustainability issue is to educate and encourage people into buying a variety of fish not just the one type. This meeting was very helpful as it has backed up a few of the areas I have been researching already.

                                                        

Research: ‘Hugh’s Fish Fight’

I have been looking into issues that are connected with fish & chips. The next few blog posts will be about some of the research I have been doing into these areas to see how they might affect my project, design and give me inspiration.

It was suggested that I watch ‘Hugh’s Fish Fight’ to give me some inspiration for my project. I hadn’t watched this series before but I had heard about it. Before watching I didn’t realise how crazy the discarding problem that fisherman face is.

In the U.K. haddock and cod is rare due to overfishing, we eat more than our stocks are able to produce therefore it now needs to be safeguarded. Fishing quotas have been given to fishermen so they are not allowed to land over a certain amount of fish. If they catch more than their quota while at sea they have to throw it back dead! It seems strange to me as this isn’t helping sustainability because if the fish are already dead it’s just getting wasted, as Hugh would say it’s “madness!”

Hugh mentioned that the “Chippy is a real problem at the heart of British fish culture.” Basically the fish & chip shop is the main reason people only eat these two types of fish, haddock and cod. The chip shop made it available, appealing and easily accessible to the customer so it became something they were used to and comfortable with. Maybe if they offered other types of fish people would get used to it too and not be scared of trying something new, but is it too late? Well we need to create this market for under utilised species to save haddock and cod. Since the chip shop seems to be at the heart of the problem maybe this is where we should start. Surely if it was made available to them we could make the public love another type of fish as much as they love cod and haddock. I think people are just scared of the unknown.

In Hugh’s programme he got the chippys selling mackerel baps in an attempt to make it the new cod and chips. I think if we keep trying it could happen!