Seafood Expo Global, which has run in Barcelona since the show moved out of Brussels in 2021, closed on Thursday after three days of trade-floor conversations, demonstration kitchens and the kind of low-key deal-making that the published programme barely captures. The Scotland Pavilion this year was sized for twelve exhibiting companies, ran two chef-led demonstration slots a day, and was — by the working judgement of the trade-body staff who ran it — the most confident the Scottish pavilion has looked at the show since the pre-Brexit period.
That confidence is a small but real thing, and it deserves to be reported as such. The Scottish seafood-export sector has spent six years in a state of more or less continuous regulatory turbulence: the Brexit transition itself; the staged introduction of Border Target Operating Model checks; the export health-certificate regime as it actually operates rather than as it was sold; and, most recently, the January 2026 changes that require additional information from exporters and the wider supply chain for any non-exempt species leaving the United Kingdom. The cumulative effect of those changes on the working day of a small Scottish processor is not modest, and it is the conversation that has dominated the trade-body meetings of the past three years.
What appears to have shifted, by the evidence of conversations on the pavilion floor this week, is that the sector has stopped expecting the regulatory environment to change and has started building business models that assume the friction is permanent. That is, depending on one's view, either a defeat or an adaptation. The honest answer is probably both. The smaller Scottish processors who were exporting on tight margins to EU markets through the late 2010s — particularly in shellfish — have, in significant number, exited the export market or consolidated. The ones who remain in the EU game in 2026 are typically larger, better-resourced, with dedicated compliance functions and a logistics partnership in place. The shape of the export sector is meaningfully different from what it was eight years ago.
The headline figure — £1bn in Scottish seafood exports — is one the Scottish Government, Seafood Scotland and HM Revenue and Customs all use, and it has held up better than the most pessimistic post-Brexit forecasts. What that figure conceals is the within-sector composition. Salmon, by far the largest single export by value, has held remarkably steady through the regulatory transition. Shellfish, particularly nephrops and crab, has had a much harder time. The langoustines that go to Spanish and French wholesale markets are a thinner pipeline than they were in 2018, and the supply chain has restructured around larger consolidators rather than the dozens of smaller operators who used to ship direct.
The sector has stopped expecting the regulatory environment to change and has started building business models that assume the friction is permanent.
What was striking on the pavilion floor this week was the absence of the political conversation. Three years ago, Brussels-or-Barcelona pavilions were full of Scottish exporters venting about Westminster, about Edinburgh, about the lorry queues at Dover, about everyone. This year the conversation was about new markets, about Asia-Pacific buyers, about the slow opening of US wholesale for premium Scottish salmon, about the surprising strength of demand from southern European retail in the year after the wider EU food-price normalisation. The political grievance has not vanished. It has been moved off the trade-floor agenda because nobody now believes it is going to be reflected in policy on either side of the Channel any time soon.
The chef-led demonstrations at the pavilion were, as is the form, the busiest part of the floor. Gary Maclean and Emilien Rouable did short sets on Scottish salmon, on West Coast scallops, on smoked haddock as a building block in modern continental cuisine. The point of these demonstrations is not to sell to the chefs in the audience; it is to put product in front of buyers' chefs who will be cooking for the same buyers in three months' time. The Scottish trade-body staff running the slots know that and design accordingly.
One conversation that did surface, repeatedly, was the open question of the European Partnership Bill that was set out in the King's Speech the week before. The Bill's proposed alignment of UK and EU food regulation in particular sectors — the Hansard text mentions food regulation, electricity trading and carbon emissions — would, if it lands in the form briefed in the run-up to the State Opening, materially change the export-paperwork picture for some categories of Scottish seafood. Whether it would change it enough to repair the lost capacity at the smaller-processor end of the sector is doubtful. Whether it would make the working week of the surviving exporters less complicated is plausible. Nobody at the pavilion was prepared to say anything stronger than that on the record.
The Scottish Fishermen's Federation, which is part of the broader sectoral conversation rather than a direct exhibitor at the expo, has spent the past month restating its position on the EU fisheries negotiations that are due to conclude in June. The position is, in summary, that public opinion supports UK control of fishing grounds and that any negotiated extension of EU access should be tied to corresponding access for UK exports. That argument is one for the negotiation. It is not one that the pavilion-floor exporters are particularly interested in this week; their problems are downstream of that argument, in the working flow of paperwork between a Mallaig processor and a Madrid wholesaler.
The £1bn figure will hold for another year. The composition underneath it will continue to drift. The companies on the Barcelona floor this week are the ones who survived the worst of the transition and are now back in a business of buying, selling and shipping. The smaller-processor question — what to do about the dozens of companies that did not make it through to this point — is not on the trade-show agenda, and probably should be.
By Hamish MacGregor — Business Editor at The Scottish Review. He writes on Scottish business, energy and the wider macroeconomic picture.