Good afternoon.
I am here representing the Overwaitea Food Group. We're a chain of grocery supermarkets that do business in British Columbia and Alberta. We have 124 stores. We believe in sustainability. It's the right thing to do, as far as we're concerned, and our customers, we believe, believe in sustainability.
We have three green goals, which are to sell eco-friendly products, to have zero waste, and to have 100% renewable energy.
Some of our goals are as follows. We work with BC Hydro in British Columbia on energy-related matters, and today our stores use about 25% less power than they did in the past. We compost in 41 of our stores. We recycle cardboard and have been doing that since the nineties.
For us, seafood was the next thing that we believed we had to work on. So in 2009 we entered into a partnership with SeaChoice to help us develop our seafood policy. One of our guidelines states that we offer sustainable seafood options and reduced procurement of unsustainable seafood. We want to offer our customers more sustainable salmon choices.
When we went looking for more sustainable salmon choices, there were very few options available to us. But in 2010 we found a partner to provide us with closed contained salmon; that partner happened to be AquaSeed, and the product they sell is called SweetSpring salmon. It is a U.S. company, so a Canadian company now has to import U.S. fish to provide sustainable seafood for our consumers.
On the economics of it, the first thing we have to realize is that seafood is one of the most expensive proteins on the market, especially fresh salmon. We currently sell a significant amount of closed contained salmon. While today it is not quite as profitable as farmed penned salmon, it certainly is a viable alternative.
Our cost for farmed salmon is slightly more than for the net penned salmon that we've sold in the past, but supply and demand play a big role in the costing, the pricing. Closed containment farms now are very small. The two we looked at in British Columbia were too small to even provide part of our needs.
As the enterprise gets larger, certainly we believe that our cost price for contained salmon, farmed salmon, land-based, will be near the cost that we currently pay for Atlantic salmon. Actually, when we made the deal for the closed contained salmon, it cost exactly the same as Atlantic salmon, but of course it's on the commodities market and supply and demand affect Atlantic penned salmon as well.
Today we sell more salmon than we did a year ago, and that includes fresh salmon, it includes frozen wild salmon from mostly British Columbia and Alaska, and also closed containment salmon.
From a customer's perspective, I think they understand the concept of sustainability. They want a grocery store they can trust and they want to be able to trust us around the store, and that would include our sustainable policy around seafood. Do they specifically understand what sustainability means? I think a few do. They understand that we have to acquire products that are sustainable in the long term.
Customers want salmon. They want it now. They will want it 10 years from now and 15 years from now. They also do not want a season around salmon. Most of the purchases, or 70% of the purchases, are fresh. It's a premium product that's a treat for dinner. If you look at salmon, it's a very expensive protein. This week, as an example, we're selling it for about $18 a kilogram for a fillet, and we're selling New York strip for $11 a kilogram.
Salmon is a relatively expensive protein, but they want it year round, and they want it fresh.
As we've moved down the road of selling fresh, frozen, and closed containment salmon, we've actually had no negative feedback from our customers because of the fact that we have less Atlantic penned salmon available for them. They choose the product by quality. They choose it, to some extent, by price. We've had very positive outcomes from our choice to sell sustainable seafood.
That's pretty much all I have.