Main structure of RMB 200 million tuna deep-processing project completed, trial production by year-end!

September 17 news: The main construction of the Zhichuang Weilai high-quality tuna full-industry-chain deep-processing project, located in the Putuo Economic Development Zone of Zhoushan, has been fully completed. Construction has moved into the stages of decoration, electromechanical equipment installation and commissioning, and cold-storage supporting facilities construction. Progress is ahead of schedule, laying the foundation for trial production by the end of the year. The project is invested in and built by Zhejiang Zhichuang Weilai Food Industry Co., Ltd., with a total investment of RMB 200 million, covering about 30 mu, with a total floor area of about 40,000 square meters. Construction started in October 2025, and the project is scheduled to be fully completed and put into operation in early 2027.

Unlike traditional aquatic product processing enterprises, this project focuses on the high-value, full-component circular utilization of tuna. The plant is equipped with modern deep-processing workshops, intelligent automated storage and retrieval warehouses, and a professional R&D and testing center, while also building a full-area low-temperature cold-chain logistics system and a full-process smart management and control system. The intelligent, clean production lines can produce multiple categories at scale, including tuna loins, premium canned products, and ready-to-eat retort-pouch foods, covering scenarios such as daily consumption, healthy meal replacement, and infant diets; by-products such as fish heads, bones, skin, and viscera are also deep-processed simultaneously to achieve secondary value addition and improve the comprehensive utilization rate of marine raw materials.

According to calculations by the Putuo Economic Development Zone, after the project reaches full production, it will be able to process 30,000 tons of tuna and various marine raw materials annually, with annual output value exceeding RMB 500 million. It will fill the local capacity gap in high-end marine prepared dishes and healthy functional aquatic food products.

Putuo, where the new plant is located, is a core region of China's tuna processing landscape: its processing volume of tuna and squid firmly accounts for half of the national total, its distant-water fishery output accounts for 15% of the country's and 45% of Zhejiang Province's, its annual fish cargo throughput ranks first in the country, and the output value of the "one fish" full industry chain has exceeded RMB 57 billion, with more than 100 aquatic product processing enterprises above designated size. The export structure confirms the weight of deep processing: a January 2026 analysis report on China's tuna export data by Dongpin Gonglue shows that prepared or preserved tuna (canned and prepared products) is China's largest tuna export category, accounting for 60.25% of total exports that month; Zhejiang, Fujian, and Shandong are the three core exporting provinces. Deep-processing capacity is precisely the foundation of Zhejiang's tuna exports.

Channel layout has already moved ahead. On September 3, the Putuo District "one fish" industry chain quality SMEs production-sales integration matchmaking meeting was held in Donggang, where channel parties such as JD.com, Tencent Fresh, Walmart, and the Central Federation of Fisheries Cooperatives of Korea met on-site with more than 20 local aquatic product enterprises, with preliminary purchase intentions exceeding RMB 50 million. At the matchmaking meeting, Putuo's product matrix was showcased in a concentrated manner, from primary products such as frozen shrimp and frozen hairtail, to seafood prepared dishes such as vegetable salad with tuna, and further to tuna oil and marine-derived cosmetics. The five market channels planned by the Zhichuang Weilai project—mass consumption, high-end catering, e-commerce new retail, gift procurement, and bulk group purchasing—highly overlap with the lineup of channel parties present.

For Putuo's distant-water fishery, the direct significance of this new plant is the shift from "mainly exporting raw materials" to exporting deep-processed finished products. The next two milestones are already clear: the production line commissioning status at trial production by the end of the year, and, after full production in early 2027, the actual operating rates of the loin and canning lines and the pace of raw material consumption—whether the 30,000-ton annual processing capacity can be delivered on schedule will determine the actual extent of the expansion of Putuo's tuna deep-processing capacity.