In Shanghai, the hottest thing is live Canadian lobster delivered to your door

Perhaps one of the best and most recent examples showing the potential of the Chinese market involves the humbleCanadian lobster.

• Fishing for China: Making money off Asia's growing appetite

When you visit the high-end restaurants of Shanghai's Pudong district, you learn that restaurants here dish up lobster, and plenty of it.

That being said, according people in the business, lobster more than five years ago wasn't even popular in China.

Somehow, things started to take offand boy,did they ever.

In fact, the market has exploded far beyond the walls of splashy restaurants with their succulent dishes.

All of a sudden,Chinese consumerswere ordering Canadian lobster directly through online vendorslikeAlibaba.

In 2014, Chinese people bought 100 tonnes of Canadian lobster on Alibaba.

In 2015, more than 300 tonnes were sold there.

Live lobster, delivered to your door

Getting fresh lobster is easier than you might suspect.

All you need to do is go online, order a lobster from the site, andget same-day delivery of a live lobster to your door.

A one-kg lobster will costyou about $70.

To learn more, I headed to the biggest seafood market in Shanghai, which ison Tongchuan Road.

If it comes from the ocean and people eat it, you can find it somewhere along this road.

As scooters zip by, trucks are beingfilled with box after box after box. All over,you see workers scooping various critters out of tanks to be put in the boxes.

The business is non-stop, and there are more than just scooters taking seafood straight to the consumer. Vans transport these boxes throughout Shanghai and to other major Chinese cities.

What's remarkable is how quickly the industry is evolving in China.

This type of seafood delivery, using methods you'd associate with apizza rather than alobster that is still very much alive,has only really picked up in popularity of the last three or four years.

Where is the market heading?

Everywhere you go in Shanghai, you see a love of seafood, a growing demand for quality and the means to pay for it.

China's middle class is now between 300 million and400 million,and growing.

Perhaps the question isn't how much more will demand grow, but instead, how much can we afford to sell?

The Fishing for China serieswas made possible thanks to a fellowship from the Asia Pacific Foundation with support from Cathay Pacific.