Distributors of frozen meat and seafood Freshet ‘et International Pte Ltd opened its sixth outlet at the Laqere Market in Nasinu yesterday.
Company managing director Richard Chow said the opening of the butcher at Laqere had been long time coming since they had been considering the idea for some time, aligned to their plan to open up outlets in areas where they could cater for those in the low to middle income bracket like Nasinu.
He said they had just established an outlet in Nausori with plans set to expand to Nadi and Lautoka. Called Super Butcher, it offers pork, beef, lamb and poultry meat and frozen fish.
“Our supply is not constrained only to local because a lot of our meat and fish are imported from overseas,” Mr Chow said in response to a question from The Fiji Times.
“A good example is pork, we can never get enough local pork so we import quite a lot of pork from Australia to subsidise the shortage in the Fiji market.
“Fish is also sometimes scarce so we import out of Australia and New Zealand, even from Japan and as far as China to fulfil the shortage that we have here locally.
“Our lamb is obviously all imported from Australia and New Zealand. And poultry, come the festive season is always in short supply and we have to look at overseas markets – we import poultry from New Zealand.”
The company invested $100,000 into setting up the facility, and will employ nine full time staff.
Nasinu Town Council acting chief executive officer and board chairman Felix Magnus said the new butcher meant the people in Nasinu and surrounding areas now had access to fresh supplies of quality meat.
“We hope we can expand Freshet, looking at the developments happening around Laqere market and the areas around it, into a fully-fledged butcher and fish suppliers to cater for the high demand that is here in Nasinu,” Mr Magnus said.
