The agreements don’t specify whether the tonnage commitment refers to live weight equivalent (i.e. whole shrimp) or headless peeled weight. My sense is that, from context, producers are interpreting it as the former.
Gotcha — if this is true, then 14g again seems kind of low for the average shrimp weights to use here! I expect using the 14g estimate will cause you to overestimate how many individuals you are affecting. Anyway I think you are already tracking this now, so I will stop belaboring the point :) Glad you are following up on this!
(No longer stand by this sentence) I’m a bit confused why the ambiguity would work in your favor: if producers are assuming the stunning requirements are based on live weight tonnage, doesn’t this mean they have to stun fewer shrimp in order to meet your requirements?
This is the reason why we always try to have the buyers being party to the agreements stating that they will prioritise stunned shrimp.
Interesting! I wasn’t aware there was such appetite amongst consumers to prioritise this issue — that’s pretty encouraging, thanks for sharing!
Thank you both for all the work you do. Hope to see you around!
I actually don’t think that we would be overestimating. Your original intuition was correct.
The way it works in practice is that buyers ask for a certain size of shrimp (e.g. 14g). This is always quoted in live weight equivalent. Then comes the second criterion of being peeled, etc. This normally means that somewhere between 35-50% of the weight is lost. If we just use 50% for simplicity purposes, there are two possible scenarios:
The producer assumes the agreement was for live weight equivalent and there is no change to our numbers, OR
The producer assumes that it refers to the volume actually sold. Because each shrimp weighs 50% less, we need to gross up our numbers by that factor, i.e. the number of individual shrimps would be 2x our estimate
Gotcha — if this is true, then 14g again seems kind of low for the average shrimp weights to use here! I expect using the 14g estimate will cause you to overestimate how many individuals you are affecting. Anyway I think you are already tracking this now, so I will stop belaboring the point :) Glad you are following up on this!
(No longer stand by this sentence)
I’m a bit confused why the ambiguity would work in your favor: if producers are assuming the stunning requirements are based on live weight tonnage, doesn’t this mean they have to stun fewer shrimp in order to meet your requirements?Interesting! I wasn’t aware there was such appetite amongst consumers to prioritise this issue — that’s pretty encouraging, thanks for sharing!
Thank you both for all the work you do. Hope to see you around!
I actually don’t think that we would be overestimating. Your original intuition was correct.
The way it works in practice is that buyers ask for a certain size of shrimp (e.g. 14g). This is always quoted in live weight equivalent. Then comes the second criterion of being peeled, etc. This normally means that somewhere between 35-50% of the weight is lost. If we just use 50% for simplicity purposes, there are two possible scenarios:
The producer assumes the agreement was for live weight equivalent and there is no change to our numbers, OR
The producer assumes that it refers to the volume actually sold. Because each shrimp weighs 50% less, we need to gross up our numbers by that factor, i.e. the number of individual shrimps would be 2x our estimate
Hope this clarifies the issue.