Global boom in taste for octopus squeezes market as prices double for trendy cephalopod

It has long been one of Spain’s most beloved dishes: simple, succulent slices of spiced octopus enjoyed in tavernas and on seafront terraces from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

But the growing worldwide popularity of Japanese, Spanish and Hawaiian cuisines is squeezing the octopus market, with soaring demand forcing up prices to double that of two years ago.

Poor catches have aggravated the situation, and in the northern Spanish community of Galicia, home of the famed octopus dish, the mollusc is in increasingly short supply.

The average market price of regular-sized octopus in Galicia has risen from around €7-14 per kilogramme, with larger specimens costing more.

In countries such as the US, with swelling appetites for the tentacled cephalopod and little domestic fishing, even higher sums can be commanded. 

"The price will rise even more," Carmen Torres Lorenzo, who for three decades has sold fish in the market of Bueu, told Associated Press. "I wish a lot of octopus would appear… and the price will come down, but that won’t happen."

Across Galicia, restauranteurs and grocers say they now often run out of octopus early in the day, if they can get it at all.

Some restaurants have taken to using stickers to reflect the seemingly inexorable price rise on menus and in front windows.

Others report selling at a loss, wary of passing such hefty hikes onto their clientele.  

The international spread of the Hawaiian poke bowl, a raw fish salad, is partly to blame for the phenomenon, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). 

Its 2018 world fisheries report also cited increasing global consumption of Japanese food and Spanish tapas as boosting demand in all key markets. 

Meanwhile supply has dwindled in the past two years due to “poor” catches in some of the biggest producing countries such as Morocco and Mauritania, the FAO said, predicting the upwards march in trading prices would continue. 

Fisheries are not yet able to farm octopuses, which reproduce by laying eggs on the ocean floor to be fertilised and transported by currents. 

Teams in Japan and Spain are working on ways to replicate that delicate process, but they are not yet ready for commercial production.

José Manuel Rosas, head of the fishing guild in Bueu, one of the leading sources of octopus in Spain, said the rising prices were a boon to the fishermen themselves, at least in the short term. 

But, he said, there was an inherent risk in octopus becoming a luxury dish when it was not long ago considered a food accessible to everyone.

Globefish, the FAO department which monitors the world fish trade, said it was proving difficult to pass the higher prices on to the consumer, and that traders were therefore seeing their margins squeezed. 

Gorka Rodriguez, owner of la Pulpeira de Melide, a well-known restaurant in the Galician province of A Coruña, said that like others in the business he was currently selling portions of octopus for "well below" what he was paying.

He told La Vanguardia newspaper it was undesirable to hit clients with such sudden and substantial rises, but that soon he would be forced to do so.

Mr Rosas said increasing fishing quotas would have a detrimental effect. "This would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs," he told the AP. 

"We have to pamper it, we have to take care of it… [Galician octopus] production is what it is."