The Water Rat of Wanchai Read Online Free PDF

expectations, and the buyer at Major Supermarkets was having second thoughts about the length and volume of his commitment. The documentation included copies of emails that had gone back and forth, and in many of them the buyer was looking for price relief. He claimed that the market had tanked and that he could buy the same shrimp more cheaply almost anywhere. He needed help to remain competitive.
    At first Seafood Partners refused. A deal was a deal, they repeated. The buyer kept at them to reduce their prices, making (not very subtle) threats to go elsewhere to average down the cost of Seafood Partners’ product. Finally Seafood Partners relented and dropped their selling price to $4.40.
    Note 5: Didn’t Dynamic Financial Services ask if dropping the selling price of the shrimp was even remotely possible?
    As Ava read on, she could see the train wreck coming. She didn’t know what form it was going to take, but Tam’s yellow highlighting of the net weights and chemical levels offered a clue.
    There are several ways to make more money on a basic food commodity than the market warrants. Cheating on weights is perhaps the simplest. Put a label weight of one pound on a bag and then put 15 ounces of product in it, and you can increase your profit by seven percent. If someone actually weighs the bag, the packer has a problem. But the weight of shrimp is easier to manipulate than most other seafood products, since you have to add an ice glaze to protect the flesh. Under normal circumstances a five percent glaze is added, meaning that a one-pound bag’s gross weight becomes 16.8 ounces. If Seafood Partners put a twelve percent glaze on the shrimp, the bag would still have a gross weight of 16.8 ounces, but 1.8 ounces would be ice, leaving only 15 ounces of shrimp. The product would pass any rudimentary inspection.
    Another common trick is to “pump” the product, to add moisture to it. Ava didn’t know who had discovered this technique, but she knew that just about every protein sector — including beef and chicken producers — does it. With shrimp it’s very simple: all you have to do is soak them in a chemical solution, typically a tripolyphosphate. The longer you soak the shrimp and the more potent the solution, the more moisture the shrimp absorbs. The moisture adds weight — artificial weight.
    The economic impact of adding weight goes beyond the extra weight itself. Shrimp are sold by size: the larger the size, the higher the price. Shrimp that come to between 31 and 40 pieces per pound sell for more than smaller shrimp that count between 41 and 50 pieces per pound. So if Seafood Partners added enough weight chemically to change a 41–50 count into a 31–40 count, they would make more on a per pound basis.
    How many stunts had Seafood Partners tried? As it turned out, all of them. Ava could hardly believe it. Cheating using one method was risky enough. Trying two was begging for trouble. Doing all three? Craziness — or complete desperation.
    And Major Supermarkets had caught them out. Actually, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration caught them first, in a random inspection, which was when the weight discrepancy was identified. The FDA turned the problem over to Major Supermarkets’ in-house quality-control team, which bored in and exposed the whole mess. It was the excuse the buyer needed to get out of the twelve-month contract. The day after the internal inspection results, Seafood Partners were informed that they had been delisted. The product already in stores was to be picked up, the master purchase order was cancelled, inventory in the U.S. and on the water was now their problem, and none of the outstanding invoices would be paid.
    Seafood Partners did not tell Dynamic Financial Services about the fiasco. It was not until Dynamic called Major Supermarkets about the outstanding invoices that they were told what was up. In the meantime, Seafood Partners had moved the inventory and Dynamic had no idea where