Prawns and shrimp:professional buying guide, brown shrimp, common prawn, gambas, raw, cooked or thawed

01

Buying sheet

Names: EU database of commercial names. Brown shrimp grading: Regulation (EC) No 2406/96, Annex II. Common prawn size: amended French order of 28 January 2013 (commercial fishing). Fish auctions: sales declared at French fish auctions in 2024 (FranceAgriMer); these figures only cover the product sold at auction. Origins and farming: EUMOFA, based on the FAO.

02

Which shrimp for which use?

03

When to buy common prawn?

From October to January. In 2024, these four months made up nearly 70% of French auction sales of common prawn, with a peak of about 45 tonnes in December. From April to August, only 3 to 7 tonnes a month are sold for the whole of France: the common prawn is then a rare product. Le Croisic alone sold nearly 40% of the common prawn that went through the auctions in 2024; Lorient, Le Grau-du-Roi, Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie, Noirmoutier, Oléron and Concarneau follow.

Fishing rules are local. In Brittany, around Auray and Vannes, pot fishing is only open from 1 July to the last day of February, with a limited number of pots per fisher and per vessel. For a buyer, the consequence is simple: fresh common prawn from the French coasts belongs on an autumn and winter menu; in summer, tropical shrimp or brown shrimp take over.

04

Raw, cooked, defrosted: what does the label say?

• "Décongelé" (defrosted). The mention is mandatory when a frozen product is sold defrosted: a cooked shrimp that was frozen, then put back on sale at the fresh counter, must carry it. The regulation provides for exemptions, one of which directly concerns shrimp: a product defrosted before being cooked, smoked, salted, marinated or dried does not have to carry it. A tropical shrimp imported raw and frozen, then cooked in France, can therefore be sold cooked without the mention. Ask your supplier whether the shrimp has been defrosted, and when.
• "Farmed" or "caught". Mandatory, with the area (for farming, the country). A tropical shrimp is almost always farmed: about 9.2 million tonnes farmed worldwide in 2023, 80% of it Penaeus vannamei.
• The name. "Gambas" is a trade word on price lists, not a permitted name in France for P. vannamei or P. monodon: on the label, it is "crevette", "crevette blanche" or "crevette tropicale", with the scientific name.
• Allergens. Crustaceans are an allergen to be declared. Sulphites, used to delay blackening of the head, must also be declared above 10 mg/kg.

For the detail of mandatory information, see the traceability and labelling guide.

05

How to judge the freshness of a shrimp?

The EU marketing standard describes an Extra category shrimp: moist, shiny shell, shrimp that do not stick together when poured from one container to another, flesh with no foreign smell, free of sand and mucus; when peeled, the flesh comes away easily and stays firm without being tough. Shrimp that stick together, smell of ammonia or peel badly are tired. A blackening head (melanosis) is the first sign of ageing: the standard tolerates it at the start of the process, in category A, for deep-water shrimp.

06

What to replace a shrimp with when it is short or expensive?

07

What makes the price of shrimp move?

Year 2024, average first-sale prices at auction, whole of France (FranceAgriMer, sales declared at fish auctions; monthly prices read by the editorial team from the published monthly curve, rounded). The auction price is not the price paid to the fish merchant: processing, transport and margin are added to it.

Common prawn is cheapest when it is most plentiful: from October to January, with 19 to 45 tonnes sold a month, the average price stayed at around €18 to €19/kg. The relationship is not mechanical at the lowest point of the year: in June, with less than 3 tonnes, it stayed at around €19/kg; it was in August, for less than 7 tonnes, that it peaked, at about €35/kg. The spread between auctions is wide: common prawn sold at Le Grau-du-Roi, on the Mediterranean, traded at nearly half the price of Concarneau or Oléron; size, condition (live, raw, cooked) and local outlets may partly explain it, without it being possible to make a rule of it.

Brown shrimp is not detailed in the auction sales published by FranceAgriMer, and tropical shrimp does not go through the auctions: their public benchmarks are wholesale and import prices.

Quotations from the Réseau des nouvelles des marchés (FranceAgriMer market news network) and import prices, as published by EUMOFA. The import price covers a frozen shrimp, generally raw; the wholesale price, a cooked shrimp: cooking (and its weight loss), transport and margins separate them, and the two cannot be compared directly.

• The season (common prawn): prices at their lowest in autumn and winter, at their highest in summer.
• The species and production method: even at auction stage, common prawn (about €20.80/kg on average in 2024) sells for more than cooked farmed tropical shrimp at wholesale stage at Rungis (€17.00/kg).
• The size grade: for tropical shrimp, the fewer pieces per kilo, the higher the price per kilo.
• The condition: raw or cooked, whole or peeled, fresh or defrosted; always set two offers side by side at the same condition and the same size grade.
• The import price for tropical shrimp: the French average price of frozen penaeid shrimp imported from outside the EU rose from about €6.60/kg in 2019 to about €9.40/kg in 2024 (EUMOFA).
• The weather for common prawn: with a few tonnes a month in summer, a few days without boats going out are enough to empty the supply.