TGA Foods launches ready-to-cook tilapia

Pampanga-based TGA Foods Corp. launched recently its latest product: ready to cook whole tilapia.

TGA Foods Corp. president and chief executive officer Rene G. Tayag said his company has made deliveries of its ready to cook whole tilapia, fillets, skins and smoked tilapia to the Makro stores, Robinson’s supermarkets and Big R warehouse stores, and most recently at South Supermarket, which has supermarkets in Batangas and Laguna.

Called Nile Pacific, the new product comes in whole gilled gutted and scaled (WGGS) packages, which is very convenient and more economical for the Filipino consumers, since what they are buying is already the prepared fish, rather than the traditional wet market fish that is complete with scales, gills and intestines, Tayag said.

Priced at P58 per piece — with each piece having a net weight of from 500 to 800 grams — the WGGS fish would end up cheaper on the pocket, not to mention its being very convenient and easy to prepare.

The conventional way that tilapia is sold in the wet market and supermarkets is they are weighed complete with intestines, gills and scales all of which make the fish very heavy on the scale. The prevailing price of tilapia ranges from P50 per kilo (for the small pieces of six to eight pieces to a kilo) to P75 (for the big sizes of two pieces to a kilo).

TGA (which stands for Tayag, Goquingco Aquaculture Farms) started out as a 10-hectare grow-out pond in Arayat, expanding into a hatchery that has its own feed mill (the FeedWorld also based in Pampanga) and only this year its semi-mechanized processing facility in the Clark Special Economic Zone.

TGA has been supplying five star hotels with its tilapia fillets and the market has been steadily growing for the past three years, Tayag told The Star.

In the process of producing fillets, TGA has also accumulated a substantial volume of tilapia skin, which it had been supplying to chicharon makers in Luzon and of late would also be selling to supermarkets for housewives wanting to do their own chicharons at home.

TGA also has the facility to produce world class smoked tilapia, which is another product with a great potential not just in the local market but also in Filipino communities abroad, Tayag said.

"We are marketing our products as a healthy food alternative especially for people who have been trying to avoid cholesterol and fatty foods throughout the year," Tayag said.