With export markets and restaurants shuttered for weeks in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Australian producers and wholesalers have begun selling high-end stock directly to the public, giving ordinary households rare access to luxury meats and seafood.
Before the pandemic, Walker Seafoods Australia exported up to 80 percent of its catch — predominantly yellowfin and big-eye tuna — to restaurants in Japan and the United States. Domestic sales from the Queensland-based business, which is also Australia's largest wild-caught tuna fishery, were reserved for some of the country's most well-known, high-end restaurants.
But as COVID-19 cases spread to the United States, co-owner and managing director Heidi Walker said almost all its sales disappeared overnight.