With less than a fortnight until Christmas, Australia's largest lobster company will cook and distribute more than a million crayfish to supermarkets across the nation.
Western rock lobsters have begun their annual "whites" migration, in which freshly moulted crays walk from the West Australian coast to deeper water.
It makes for lucrative catches for fishers.
But this year's migration began only last week, making it one of the latest in some fishers' memories, and creating an anxious wait for the Geraldton Fishermen's Cooperative (GFC).
"The whites started running a week ago, so we're now full-pelt producing as much product as we can for the Aussie market," said GFC chief executive Matt Rutter.
"That's one of the beauties about a wild-caught fishery — you just never know what they're going to do.
"It has put the pressure on to get the product out, particularly to the eastern states' markets where the logistics challenge is a concern."
Over 1.2m crays for Christmas
Mr Rutter said the lobsters came from a 1,000-kilometre stretch of coastline via landing points that funnelled catches into the Fremantle frozen processing facility.
The facility is running 16 hours a day and has been upgraded to be capable of steam-cooking 2 tonnes of lobster every hour.
"We have an army of staff down there cooking, wrapping, packing and sending product off to market," Mr Rutter said.
"We'll send off 1.2 million crays over the next few weeks into Aussie homes and onto Christmas tables.
"We are loading trucks and sending them east as quickly as we can."
Lobsters from the processing facility in Fremantle are sent frozen to Woolworths and independent supermarkets as far away as north-east Queensland.
A premium lobster
Some Australian supermarkets are still selling imported lobster.
However, Mr Rutter is confident consumers are becoming more aware of western rock lobster as a premium product.
"I think the main thing is the consumers understand where the product has come from and that it's accurately labelled, and I think it's one of the challenges in seafood more generally is people knowing where the product comes from," he said.
GFC will now look at other opportunities to add further value to processed lobster, such as split and cleaned lobster tails for the food service sector and potentially for the retail market.
"We tend to find that Christmas is the one big time where there is a lot of demand and a small spike at Easter. Aside from that, consumption flattens out," Mr Rutter said.
"But at this price point, and particularly if we can come up with some more innovative home-use products, we think there is a really good opportunity for the local market to increase consumption across the year."
