It’s never too early to start planning for Christmas 2025, and as part of those plans, Pacific West has been reviewing the retailer ranges of Christmas delights, ready to inspire your festive feast planning.
M&S is known for its premium quality and innovative products, which showcased a range of value added shellfish and “picky bits”. Here are some of our highlights from the M&S 2024 range, which included:
- Layered seafood towers
- Lots of Prawns – including a King Prawn medley with paprika sauce & harissa butter
- Mini Wholetail Breaded Scampi & Chips in little cones
Reviewing the other retailers, there was a lot of Smoked Salmon, upgraded Prawn cocktails and seafood platters.
Here are some of our favourites:
- Aldi – King Prawn Selection, with Prawn lollipops, Penang style butterfly Prawns and Filo Green Thai Prawns
- Tesco – King Prawn Selection, with spicy firecracker, lemon & herb and tempura coatings
- Waitrose – Shimmering Salmon mousse
- There were also festive Bao Buns with various fillings and fun looking bites across different categories and ranges.
Having reviewed Christmas 2024, here are the Pacific West Christmas seafood category recommendations for 2025:
- Smoked Salmon is a perennial favourite and a staple in any Christmas offering as it’s so versatile and has luxury appeal. For hospitality operators, it has multiple uses across menus, from classic eggs benedict for brunch to a perfect accompaniment to Prawns.
- Value Added Prawn cocktails are easy to create and wow your customers. At Pacific West we like creating individual pots of Prawns and filling them with a hot sauce, then adding a coated King Prawn for high impact. The Panko Coated Prawns and Sweet Chilli Prawns look fabulous as the garnish!
- Create your own King Prawn medley with our Garlic & Herb Marinated Prawns, add toasted pistachios or a swirl of sriracha to give it a Christmas twist.
- Looking for an easy to serve starter with a touch of wintery impact? Serve up snowball effect bites using the NEW Crispy Red Thai Curry Calamari & Vegetable Nests.
- And for a brilliant “picky” bite, our new Sweet and Sour Prawns skewered into mango and avo, on top of the new Sweetcorn Fritters look every bit the star of the show.
