Japan Food Service Co. subsidiary Japan Delica Co. is planning to export scallops from Japan to Bangladesh to be processed at a new factory in the southeast town of Cox’s Bazar.
The company said it has already been exporting scallop raw material from Japan – sourced from major production areas like Hokkaido and Aomori – to Bangladesh to be processed in its factory. Japan Delica Co. has been operating a soft shell crab processing plant in the Shatkhira District in Bangladesh since 2018 and said it will use the technology it has developed through that business to establish the new plant in Cox’s Bazar.
Japan Delica Co. added it plans to process between 800 and 1,000 metric tons of raw scallops per month and will sell the products to overseas markets “such as the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.”
The project in part came about thanks to a memorandum of cooperation between Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries and Bangladesh’s Ministry of Agriculture, which was finalized in May 2024. Japan Delica Co. said it will begin processing scallops in September 2024, making it the first company in Bangladesh to import and process Japanese scallops.
“The Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock of Bangladesh and others stated that they would cooperate with the initiative,” Japan Delica Co. said. “Until now, Japanese scallops have been mainly processed in China, including being shelled, but there is now a demand to have this processed in a third country other than China.”
August marked the one-year anniversary of China banning all imports of Japanese seafood in response to Japan authorizing the release of treated cooling water into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Japanese scallop exporters have since been forced to find alternative processing solutions as many companies sent thousands of tons of the product to China before the ban.
Japan’s seafood exports to China plummeted in 2023, and the Japan Scallop Export Promotion Association has been working on creative ways to find new markets for the product.
