Frozen Octopus Supplier: Whole Octopus, Cooked Tentacles and Baby Octopus

Product overview

Octopus is bought by the piece and judged on the plate by texture, so four questions decide every order: which species it is, how heavy each animal is, whether it has been tenderized, and whether it arrives raw or cooked. A 2 kg common octopus bound for a Galician-style dish and a 30 g baby octopus for a grill skewer are separate products with separate buyers, and we handle them that way, quoting each against its own weight bands and processing steps rather than under one generic heading.

Common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) supplies most of the European and Japanese whole-octopus trade, with major fisheries off North-West Africa and smaller volumes from other Atlantic and Mediterranean grounds. The East Asian population is now often classified as a separate species, Octopus sinensis, and we use whichever name the destination accepts. Day octopus (Octopus cyanea), a reef species of the Indo-Pacific, is caught in Indonesia, the Philippines and East Africa and processed in much the same way. Baby octopus is not the young of these large species but a group of small octopuses of the genus Amphioctopus, chiefly the marbled or sandbird octopus (A. aegina) and the veined octopus (A. marginatus), taken by trawl and trap in the Gulf of Thailand and neighboring Asian waters; the two are easily confused, so many lots are declared as Amphioctopus spp.

Large octopus is frozen whole round or cleaned, with the viscera, beak and eyes removed, and may be tumbled in a drum before freezing to break down the tough connective tissue in the arms. Cooked lines include whole boiled octopus, individual cooked tentacles in vacuum bags, and boiled octopus sliced or diced for sushi and takoyaki. Whole octopus is graded by weight per piece in bands such as 200⁠–⁠500 g, 500 g–1 kg, 1⁠–⁠2 kg, 2⁠–⁠3 kg and over 3 kg, and North-West African packers and the Spanish buyers they supply also use a numbered T-scale on which T1 is the heaviest grade. Baby octopus comes whole cleaned, flower cut, blanched or seasoned, at 10⁠–⁠20, 20⁠–⁠40, 40⁠–⁠60 or 60⁠–⁠80 g per piece.

Inspection covers the weight band, glaze, skin and sucker condition after tumbling, leftover beak or sand in the mantle, odor and, for cooked lots, an even purple-red skin over white flesh. We also look at the suckers themselves, because octopus of the genus Eledone carries a single row on each arm instead of two and must be sold under its own name. Typical buyers are Mediterranean importers, Japanese and Korean processors, tapas and grill restaurants, and makers of seafood salads and ready meals; baby octopus also goes into marinated barbecue packs and our frozen seafood mix. The frozen squid and frozen cuttlefish lines serve the same customers and can share a container.