3 seafood products that became popular thanks to marketing strategies

• Lobster was once served as prison food and used as fish bait.
• Chilean sea bass is actually a deep-sea cod called Patagonian greenling.
• And the fishermen used to throw the squid back into the sea, and it came to be called squid.

Sometimes, a small rebrand can do wonders for your reputation. That also applies to seafood.

Some of today’s most popular seafood that we think of as fancy and delicious was once considered gross garbage food.

Learn how clever marketing schemes in the 1800s and 1900s gave lobster, squid, and Chilean seabass the sparkle they needed to become beloved.

Lobster was once considered an inferior product

When European settlers first came to North America, lobsters were so abundant along the New England coast that 2-foot-tall mountains lined the shores of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Business Insider says. Previously reported.

Lobster was considered a poor man’s meal and the “cockroach of the sea” at the time, and was often used as fertilizer, fish feed, and even prison food.

But with the advent of the railroad industry in the mid-1800s, railroad managers realized that passengers across the country were unaware of lobster’s bad reputation on the East Coast. According to Pacific Standard. So they started serving it on trains, marketing it as a rare item even though it was very cheap and considered a low-grade item at the time, the magazine reported.

Thanks to savvy railway managers, lobsters became increasingly popular on and off trains in the following decades, according to the Standard. Lobster prices peaked in the 1920s, and lobster dishes were suddenly seen as the pinnacle of luxury, only to be revisited during the Great Depression and World War II. Mother Jones reported.

However, by the 1950s, according to Pacific Standard, lobster was, and continues to be, considered decadent.

Chilean sea bass is actually called Patagonian greenling

Chilean sea bass is usually the most expensive fish sold in upscale restaurants, alongside luxury items such as foie gras and caviar.

But its beginnings were more humble.

In 1977, the Wall Street Journal reported that California fish merchant Lee Lantz was searching for a new product in South America when he discovered the Patagonian greenling in Chile.

According to the magazine, the Patagonian greenling, a terrifying 5-foot-long bulbous fish with giant eyes and teeth, was little more than a disposable deep-sea cod that no one knew what to do with.

Lantz found the fish to be white and flaky on the inside, with little flavor of the fish itself. This would be the perfect blank canvas for American chefs. Price Economics reported.

But the name “greenling” didn’t have much market value, so Lantz gave it the more upscale-sounding name “Chili seabass,” which Americans quickly devoured.

The slimy squid was battered and renamed “squid”

We all know that squid is just squid, but it’s only in recent decades that this popular seafood dish has made its way onto American appetizer menus.

Squid — known in Spanish as calamar; Calamaro In Italian — it has been prepared as a dish in Europe for centuries. But before 1970, American fishermen would simply throw them back or use them as bait to attract more lucrative fish, according to the New York Times.

And when the popular fish became difficult to obtain in the early 1970s, politicians and conservationists realized they needed a way to convince Americans to eat more fish like squid, according to the Times. reported.

But squid gets a bad rap, and an enterprising young business student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovers that by breading it and frying it like onion rings, you can successfully hide its slimy texture. Until then, the Times reports.

Some industry leaders decided that rebranding squid to “squid,” which comes from the Romance word for squid, would make it seem more exotic and delicious to consumers, the Times reported. Ta.

And by the 1980s and 1090s, squid’s popularity had skyrocketed, making it one of the trendiest foods of the time, according to Town Dock, a global squid supplier.

So if your meatloaf recipe isn’t popular at holiday parties, perhaps all you need is a slight change to the brand name, such as Boeuf Fumé.