Why is tinned tuna so cheap compared to tuna steak when they are both from the same fish?
In: Economics
Yes, they are both from the same fish.
Tinned tuna, or aluminum foil bagged tuna, is a shelf stable product. You put the tins in a box and put the box on a ship and it’s still good when they unload it onto the store shelves. All the processes before it was put in the tin are necessary for this to be safe. Tuna steak is a piece of fresh fish, and it has to be refrigerated at all times, particularly in transit, or it will go bad. Refrigerated processing and shipping costs a great deal more, and must be done quickly (which also costs more).
Typically a big tuna called albacore tuna is used for canned tuna, it’s quality is low but holds up well to being fully cooked, while the higher quality fish like bluefin or yellowfin is used for steaks because people won’t fully fully cook it and leave it rear to enjoy the texture, and flavor.
They are different species of fish. Canned tuna is Albacore Tuna, tuna steaks and sushi comes from Bluefin Tuna. Albacore tuna are much more abundant and easy to catch hence the lower price.
First off, the species of tuna typically used for each are different in terms of quality and cost. Secondly, a large amount of the cost of fresh tuna is due to the importance of freshness — it has to be precicely temperature controlled on ice/refrigerated, it gets transported by plane to get it into stores and restaurants quickly, and there is a significant loss due to throwing out spoiled product. Canned tuna is sealed soon after catch and cooked in the can to kill any bacteria, meaning it’s shelf stable and has a long expiration date that allows for much cheaper transportation and the ability to store for long periods of time, whether in a warehouse, store shelf, your home.
They are the same fish in the same way a pug and a timberwolf are both dogs. Canned tuna is typically skipjack tuna which are typically 3 or 4 feet in length. They are considered least threatened in terms of their conservation status. You also don’t have to find unblemished whole pieces to put in a can. Steaks, on the other hand, require a piece to be free from any defects and typically come from rarer tuna like albacore and blue or yellow fin which grow up to 15 feet and weigh more than a Mazda Miata.
Yeah it’s kinda like asking why a burger at McDonalds is a buck or so and a steak costs several dollars a pound. Even though they both come from a cow.
Tuna steak is made from high quality large tuna fish which is handled carefully. Canned tuna can take small lower quality steak, put it into a deboning and cooking machine in order to create a very uniform large scale product which you can then dump in a can, and stack those cans closely together to ship. And the product in that can has experienced massive shrinkage. You can take the tuna straight out of the ocean and debone and skin it and throw all of that skin and bones away and ship only the compact calories of cooked tuna. And, they can be shipped much more leisurely, because they don’t expire quickly. With high quality tuna, you have to pack it in ice, not too tightly so that the meat isn’t ruined, and ship it it to a place where someone can buy it and cook it before it goes bad. The amount of care and limitations of such an operation insures that such meat is much more expensive to handle and transport, and the nature of fishing ensures that such high quality meat is rarer than lower quality fish meat, and thereby harder to catch in the same volume as lower quality meat.
Take even regular beef: With ground beef, you can only ship meat while leaving the bones behind, and packing the amorphous beef into more tightly packed spaces. With whole beef cuts, you have to transport both the bone and meat, and they can’t be tightly packed in the same way that ground beef can. So, you can either get 1 lb. of ground beef for $4, or 1 lb. of sirloin for $8. They are both basically the same material, you can simply transport meat far more efficiently if it is ground and packed tightly than if it is left whole and packed loosely so as not to ruin the structure.
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