Close your eyes and picture China. What comes to mind when you think of Chinese food? Is it the 1,000-year-old, traditional village you see? The futuristic lights of Shanghai? China is all that and much more – including becoming the third-largest importer of Norwegian seafood and our biggest growth market.
The year of China
Executive summary of the Top Seafood Consumer Trends 2026In previous years, our Trends Report has been wide reaching. For 2026, we are focusing in on a single market: China. Here, Seafood from Norway is already seen as a mark of quality – of a product that consumers can trust.
And in such a vast market, trust is crucial. Reading through the data, analysis, research and interviews that we’ve pulled together for you offers an insight into a China that can be difficult for westerners to understand and even harder to track.
But it is also a China of opportunity as a seafood market. Millions more join China’s middle class each year; new tier-one mega-cities join the ranks of the ‘big four’; and the uplift in disposable income brings new consumers to higher-value seafood.
Huge potential – the imported salmon segment grew almost 50% last year – drives excitement about the possibilities as the country moves towards higher seafood import dependence.
To harness that market potential and to integrate Norwegian seafood into the Chinese home, we need to understand what these consumers want.
CEO of the Norwegian Seafood Council
To harness that market potential and to integrate Norwegian seafood into the Chinese home, we need to understand what these consumers want.
There are cultural differences: from the family meal to single people eating alone, Chinese people do not typically take the traditional all-on-one-plate approach. Instead, they eat a selection of small dishes, prioritising variety and health.
But this approach also offers more opportunity for seafood to make it into a meal that might feature more than one protein. Another challenge in understanding China is the sheer vastness of a country with a population of 1.4 billion people.
While this means you can’t necessarily generalise on taste, the numbers still tell us a lot. Imported salmon might be a fraction of the overall import-for-consumption market, but it is growing.
Read on as we take you through a quick-fire guide to China’s tier-one cities, the growth and potential of the rising middle class and the technological factors that mean sashimi ordered online arrives fresher than if you bought it at the shops yourself.
