With the ambition to be perceived as the ‘best option in Faroe Islands,’ seafood supplier PRG Export produces and sells salted fish, fresh fillets and frozen salmon, focusing strongly on product quality.

‘PRG—best option in Faroe Islands.’ So reads a promotional headline from the sales department of PRG Export, seeking to portray a premium provider of Faroese fish and seafood products, with a track record of success, a proven value proposition, and the ambition to raise its market share.

Known as one of the leading Faroese exporters of fish and seafood products, PRG specializes in fresh and wet-salted groundfish, in addition to frozen salmon and trout from their own sea farms, serving customers around the world. While salmon is shipped to EU countries, the USA and the Far East, fresh fish is mostly sold to European markets, with salted fish going to Spain, Italy and other countries around the Mediterranean.

Behind PRG’s success there is a substance that goes well beyond the slogans: the practicalities of quality management and critical operations, beginning with the purchase of raw material, through the whole processing system all the way to shipment and delivery.

“This business is built on product quality,” said Páll Gregersen, PRG’s Managing Director. “In order to maintain and constantly develop the all-important aspect of quality across the board, we have to stick to rigorous standards. For instance, we apply strict controls to the purchase of raw material and this is essential because it’s a key component in the processing and as such it will largely precondition final-product quality levels.”

With experience ranging over generations, PRG has developed effective methods and procedures for carefully selecting and quality-grading fish, Mr Gregersen said. As to the raw material of their products, the first premises are the chilled Faroese waters, which provide excellent living conditions for fish; the fish is either caught with long line or trawl around the Faroe Islands.

“However,” Mr Gregersen noted, “for our very best products, we use only fish caught with long line, as this ensures us the highest quality. We purchase almost all of our fish through the Faroe Fish Market, but what’s more is that we go to lengths to follow up on delivery from the various fishing boats, in order to ensure that their standards meet our requirements.”

Advanced aquaculture: As a processor, PRG over the years has developed its own ways and means of production.

While using advanced technology in processing is an absolute necessity today, PRG also stresses the value in traditional Faroese workmanship.

PRG’s fresh fish are marketed as fillets, mainly from cod, redfish, saithe and monkfish, while the salfish consists of salted cod, ling, brosme and blueling both as fillets and split fish.

As for farmed salmon, PRG was among the pioneers of Faroese aquaculture. It offers gutted fresh and frozen Atlantic salmon. Handling the entire process from brood stock, egg hatching, farming and slaughtering, the company is able to monitor its production closely, using computerized systems for measuring everything from automated feeding to water temperatures and a number of other critical values. With a vertically integrated production system, PRG’s salmon division has built one of the world’s most advanced smolt farms in terms of capacity and management regarding water, oxygen, cleaning and space.

“From roe to gutted salmon,” Mr Gregersen said, “the fish is in need of the right environment in order to develop and become healthy and valuable. Abiding by the standards of EU veterinarian authorities as well as those of the local Faroese government, makes our salmon and trout the world’s best. We have always strived for the very highest quality and in doing so, we go a bit further. For one thing, this means we are able to offer our customers full traceability, in the sense that all our salmon products have a recorded history in terms of parents, breeding environment, feeding and so forth—total quality control.”  Link to company profile