Award-winning Aberdeenshire seafood festival SeaFest Peterhead to make its welcome return in 2025

Following a successful inaugural event, the SeaFest Peterhead committee has announced today (Tuesday July 9) that the north-east festival will return in 2025.  

  The event took place for the first time in September 2023 welcoming around 14,000 attendees to Peterhead’s Port and Harbour.   

As a result, the voluntary committee have decided that to ensure the event continues to prove successful, it will be held biennially to give more time to planning an event of this scale. 

SeaFest Peterhead is expected to take place on Saturday September 13, 2025 and aims to expand into the town centre to encourage more businesses to get involved.

The celebration of local seafood was organised within the space of seven weeks by a small team of volunteers.  

It won Best New Food and Drink Tourism Experience at the North East Scotland Food and Drink Awards 2024 in May due to the committee’s efforts to bring a unique event to the masses that showcased the region’s outstanding seafood industry. 

Local businessman, Jimmy Buchan, the owner of Peterhead’s Amity Fish Company and chairman of the festival thought up the idea and never dreamed the event would be as successful as it was. 

He said: “After much discussion and taking into consideration feedback from last year’s festival to make the event bigger and better, the current committee has reached the decision that SeaFest Peterhead will return in 2025. 

“Thousands of people showed up to support the festival and we’ll be forever grateful to all who came to celebrate our excellent fishing communities. We also can’t thank our sponsors enough for helping us pull off an event of this scale.  We have a lot of ideas for our next event, some of which require a little more time for planning, and as a result we’ve decided to make the event biennial so everyone experiences the best version.  

“We have a small committee who volunteer their time to organising the event. They have busy full-time roles and families and we felt this decision was the right decision for all parties.” 

More than 60 businesses and local groups took part in the market area alone last year. 

For those interested in being involved in next year’s festival, register your interest by emailing info@seafest.co.uk.  

Activities that took place in 2023 included live cooking demos from leading north-east chefs, wild cooking workshops, free children’s entertainment, filleting demonstrations, Men United charity raffles, and an emergency services showcase to name a few. 

The Lord Lieutenant of Aberdeenshire, Sandy Manson, officially opened the event with the Peterhead Sea Cadets. 

Sponsors included Peterhead Port Authority, Seafood Scotland, Peterhead Marquee Hire, ESS Compass Group, Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, NESFD, Seafish, MacDuff Shellfish, Scottish Seafood Association, Box Pool Solutions, Scottish Fishermen’s Organisation, The Scottish White Fish Producers, Amity Fish Company and Seafood Ecosse.

An annual general meeting will be held to ensure SeaFest Peterhead showcases the area and its seafood in the best way to all. 

More information on last year’s event can be found at www.seafest.co.uk.