The Vanafish NV traditional smokehouse was founded in 1979 by the Vanacker family who owned a fish shop in Roeselare at that time and experimented with the smoking of salmon for the first time. With their high demand for service and quality, together with a growing demand for smoked salmon, the company was able to become an important actor on the Belgian market of smoked salmon, and a modern factory of 2000m² over a period of 30 years.
At the start of 2015 the company was taken over by Bruno Dumolin and Tanguy Buyse. Strongly appreciating at their turn the Vanafish values of service and excellence. Focussing in particular on product optimisation and innovation, and with a thorough commercial approach, Vanafish strives to elevate itself to a higher level as a company.
The smoking and salting of fish is a very old custom that was used in the first place to prolong the preservability of a product. With the years this functional usage changed into a way to create delicacies.
The salting is done either wet (pickle) or with dry salt. Vanafish applies both techniques, depending on the type of fish and the type of smoking. Dry salting is done the traditional way and by hand.
At Vanafish we still smoke the old-fashioned way, naturally with our own recipes in terms of duration, intensity and wood types.
An absolute condition for an excellent end product are raw materials of high quality. At Vanafish we spend a lot of our time in finding the right quality of fish.
For salmon this means a very tight collaboration with the salmon cultivators. Here we were able to identify, over the years, what the optimal areas of cultivation are, for every period of the year. In doing so we have a maximal control over the quality of our salmon.
For halibut we only work with the best quality. That is the black halibut from Greenland (Reinhardtius hippoglossoides) which is only fished on the line. This continuous approach guarantees our beautiful colour, and the firmness of our halibut filets as the starting point for our end product.