Christmas counter comparison - Where to buy your Christmas fish in Helsinki?

This week, as Christmas is coming, we decided to visit three big hypermarkets in Helsinki to find out the performance level of their fish counters. In Finland, fish is a must on the Christmas table, and many people decide where to do their Christmas shopping based on the quality and pricing of the fish counter.

This Christmas we visited: K-Citymarket Easton, Prisma Kaari and Food Market Herkku.

K-Citymarket Easton

The first store we visited was K-Citymarket Easton, located in eastern Helsinki. K-Citymarket Easton is a Kesko entrepreneur-operated hypermarket that opened in 2017. It has received many awards for its excellent counters and was selected as the best K-Citymarket in 2020. The entrepreneur Mika Timonen has done a fantastic job fulfilling customer desires and making the store one of the biggest and best K-Citymarkets. The share of fish sales in the store is one of the biggest among all K-Citymarkets. This tells us about the high quality of execution in Easton.

The counter in Citymarket Easton is extensive, and the selection appears wide. There are traditional Norwegian salmon products like gravad and smoked salmon. The wide selection of whole fish separates this K-Citymarket from the other stores in the review. The fish has already been cut in other stores, but in Citymarket, they also do the cutting. This enhances the image of freshness. The herring selection looks excellent, with many alternative flavours.

When it comes to prices, however, K-Citymarket Easton is a lot more expensive than Prisma Kaari and more costly than Food Market Herkku. If it weren’t for the whitefish roe (Siian mäti), which was much more expensive in Prisma Kaari, the price difference would have been even more significant in favour of Prisma Kaari. One factor justifying the expensiveness is the high level of manual fish-cutting work done in-store. The only question is, is this something customers are ready to pay for and does it even matter?

Prisma Kaari

The second store visited was Prisma Kaari, Finland's biggest store, with over 100 million euros in sales. The fish counter is still in progress, but the staff was very helpful and happy to answer any questions. The fish on the counter looks fresh, and the selection is very good with filet fish. However, the herring part of the counter is small compared to the two other stores. Prisma Kaari seems to focus on big-volume products, Norwegian salmon is so dominant.

Prisma Kaari also lacks essential products like gravad lax in portions rather than slices and whole Norwegian salmon. These are fundamental products for the Christmas dinner, so missing them seems weird.

What Prisma Kaari lacks in selection it takes back on pricing. The price differences between Prisma and Citymarket are huge, and one can make many savings by doing Christmas fish shopping in Prisma Kaari. There are few products Prisma is more expensive, but the fish roes are cheaper in K-Citymarket. K-Citymarket even has a one-kilo package of rainbow trout (Kirjolohi) as a pull-in product with a price of 49,95 €, which is very cheap these days.

Food Market Herkku, Helsinki City Center

The last store visited was Food Market Herkku, part of S-group. What is striking is the fish counter being partly only half full. There are many empty cups, especially in the herring section. They were probably still waiting for the fish load to arrive.

Product-wise, the selection is somewhat similar to the section in Prisma Kaari, but there are more unique products, such as oysters. One could say Food Market Herkku goes in the middle compared to Prisma and Citymarket both price and selection-wise. The prices in Food Market Herkku are a bit lower than in Citymarket, which was surprising as the store has a reputation for being expensive. The selection has some nice specialities, such as a different kind of gravad lax and gravad white fish, which Prisma Kaari didn’t have.

Verdict: which store to buy fish from?

All in all, regarding which store has the best fish counter, one must consider selection, freshness and, of course, price. In these times when the price is more critical than previously, we have selected Prisma Kaari as the best fish counter to visit this Christmas. For affordable prices, one can find almost everything a suitable Christmas fish table needs. The two other stores are also excellent, but this time we stress the meaning of price in our comparison.