The Start in Uni
While Dave Rudie was attending Edison High School, he took a summer snorkeling class. “I was just so amazed with being in the ocean, floating around and seeing all the critters out there so I learned to be a scuba diver. I got certified at 16 and would spend all my weekends diving, just looking around and seeing what was out there,” said Dave.
After high school, in 1974, Dave started at UC Irvine and studied Marine Biology, with a major in Chemistry and Biology. At one point, he heard that there was a big problem with sea urchins. The dive clubs were recommending that divers go out and kill them, since they were destroying the kelp beds. Dave did not go smash them, but soon heard that there was a buyer purchasing urchins for 7 cents a pound. With an entrepreneurial mind, Dave and his friend took to the ocean on their little boat, gathering up sea urchins in trash cans and hauled them up to LA for 7 cents a pound.
“I just loved being in the ocean and wanted to spend all my time there so I became a full-time sea urchin and seaweed diver,” said Dave. During those times the sea urchin buyers would only buy sea urchin during the winter months when it was stormy in Japan. The summer months, Dave would dive for a specific type of seaweed. There was a buyer in San Diego who would buy dried seaweed called Gelidium robustum. This particular type of seaweed would grow in Orange County and at Catalina Island, so his summer was spent diving Catalina for seaweed, and then the winters along Orange County diving for sea urchins.
Catalina Offshore Products was named after his time spent diving Catalina.
The Formation of a Business
He continued to sell both seaweed and sea urchin for a while, but then ran into a few problems. Both his seaweed and sea urchin buyers both went out of business. The sea urchin buyer was a gentleman in Tuna Harbor at Royal Pacific Seafood, and he decided not to sell urchins anymore. Meanwhile, Dave wanted to stick with sea urchins, so his choices were to either drive the sea urchins up to LA or figure out how to process them himself.
Kazumi Sushi Bar was one of Dave’s first customers, the owner gave Dave guidance on how to process the sea urchins. Then, Dave talked to Royal Pacific and the owner said “Well, if you want to use the equipment and want to hire some of my workers and use the plant at night, go ahead.”
Going International
Dave was able to start processing sea urchins at Royal Pacific at night and dive during the day. The fresh Uni was then distribute directly to sushi bars the next morning. The business quickly expanded because U.S. wholesalers wanted to buy the product. While working with U.S. buyers, Dave found a quality customer in Japan and business really exploded. The Sushi market in the United States wasn’t big yet, there was only about 15 sushi bars in all of San Diego County.
“I developed a brand called Maru-Ka. ‘Maru’ is ocean related and ‘Ka’ is from Catalina Offshore Products. I developed a Japanese logo and built up the brand. This was in mid-1980s and we started shipping to Japan. A lot of the Uni was sold at the Tsukiji market at that time, and I would do annual trips to Japan to visit customers. It was a real boom time because the economy in Japan was really, really strong. They loved sea urchin. They didn’t have enough sea urchin for their market, so that’s what really ignited this sea urchin market in California,” said Dave.
As things always do, they change. By the mid-90s, the market in Japan started getting soft. The Japanese stock market collapsed, their real estate was collapsing, and their bubble burst. By 1997-98, there was less of a market in Japan. Another factor that softened the market was that Russian sea urchins started being imported into Japan because of the trade normalization between the two countries after the Cold War. Dave noted, “there’s a lot of sea urchins in Russia that are just like the Japanese sea urchins.”
Uni Growth in the United States
Fortunately at the same time, sushi started to become popular in the U.S. so Dave and his team were able to shift their marketing efforts from Japan over to the U.S. side of the business. The U.S. market kept growing, but Dave was still exporting some product to Japan. Through the late 90s, sales increased in the U.S. market and allowed the team to move to their current building in 1998. Dave bought the building in late ’97, remodeled and fixed it up to handle sea urchin processing and fish processing.
Difference Between Urchin and Uni – What is Uni?
Sea urchin is used to describe the live animal and Uni is the Japanese name for the finished product. Uni is actually the gonad of the urchin, the male and female gonads. This is also sometimes referred to as roe or eggs, but technically male and female gonads make up the Uni.
Uni Grading
The grading is based on color and texture, and to some extent size. Different sea urchins will have different yield. If the urchins are getting a lot of food, then they’ll typically be a lot fatter giving a higher recovery. If they’re starving, they’ll give a low recovery. It’s a combination of the recovery, percentage yield, and quality of the roe to determine the value. The Uni removal and grading process is quite technical, Dave has employees that have been doing it for up to 30 years. The process takes at least three to six months to fully master.
Catalina Offshore Products looks for color, texture and taste when grading. A bright color is preferred, along with a firm texture and sweet taste. There will be a variation of taste, color and texture depending upon where the sea urchins are harvested, and to some degree the time of year. Uni taste can very between urchins that are just half a mile away from each other. Uni tends to be sweeter and fatter in the fall, and skinnier and not as sweet in the spring, but that’s not an absolute rule.
Uni Taste
“Uni has a sweet ocean-like taste, like you go down to the ocean in the morning and you smell the breeze off the ocean. There’s that kind of taste, and then the texture of course is very delicate and soft, something like an oyster with a little bit sweeter taste. Uni has more of a sweeter delicate taste,” said Dave.
Where The Sea Urchins Are Found
Dave spent most of his time diving out of San Diego, but also worked out of San Clemente, Catalina Island, San Nicolas Islands, and Santa Barbara Island. There has always been a pretty good sea urchin supply off San Diego, as long as we have good kelp then we’re going to have a good supply of them.
Sea urchins are typically harvested in 30 to 70 feet of water so it’s all dive-able depth. Sea urchins will live in the deeper water but you have such limited time it’s not usually very productive. Sometimes sea urchins can be found in shallow water, but San Diego does not have many sea urchins in the shallows since the shelf is so big. There’s times in the summer where warm water, about 78 degrees, will cause the sea urchins to die off. San Diego is at almost the southern end of the sea urchin range which ranges from Southeast Alaska down to Baja California.
How To Process Uni Yourself
For those of us who want to buy whole sea urchin from Catalina Offshore Products or any fish market that has them, there are a few methods than can used to process the uni. Catalina Offshore uses a tool that works as a reverse plier, where it is inserted into the sea urchin and pops it open. A pair of heavy duty scissors or a large hatchet can be used instead. Sea urchins are a little difficult to open; they have a stomach, reproductive organs and a defense system.
Once the urchin has been opened, the stomach and gonads, or uni, will be visible. At that point, the black membrane is the stomach and might show some bits of partially-digested food like kelp. Scoop out the inners and then wash the stomach away to get to the uni. If you’re processing your own sea urchins, you will have a very short shelf life so you basically need to eat it that night, otherwise it will melt out. The uni will be very delicate and soft, make sure to eat the yellow and orange parts not the black.
Catalina Offshore adds a very small amount of potassium alum in their last processing step which stabilizes the uni so it’ll be good for 5-6 days. Without that, the uni has only 12-24 hours before it deteriorates.
