Salmon Love: It's a Process ~ Salmon Life

Camaraderie Enterprise

Rising from a windowsill inside the main office of the Seafood Producers Cooperative in Sitka, overlooking the dock of the oldest fishermen’s cooperative in North America, is a wood carving of a salmon. It’s a trophy from Alaska Airlines Cargo. It reads, “Million Pound Club 2014,” and specifies the total weight of seafood (most of it salmon) the cooperative shipped with Alaska Airlines last year: 1,300,612 pounds.

The Seafood Producers Cooperative, or SPC, is owned and operated by 575 small boat commercial fishermen from Southeast Alaska. Its signature product is premium-quality salmon, mostly King and Coho, that are line-caught, rather than drift netted. Its slogan is, “One hook, one fish at a time.” SPC serves a niche market of high-end restaurants and grocers. Its customers are willing to pay more for salmon that is handled with exceptional care from the second they’re boated until the moment they arrive in a kitchen or fishmonger stall.

SPC's signature product is premium-quality, line-caught salmon

Seafood Producers Cooperative Plant Manager Craig Shoemaker

“We treat our fish with more love and tenderness than most salmon processors,” said SPC plant manager Craig Shoemaker. “Each and every salmon we bring to market is handled by a person eight times before it’s boxed. This is a more expensive process, but it results in a superior product. We’re low volume, compared to the biggest processors, but very high value.”

On a glorious, sun-drenched, early fall morning in Sitka, a fishing boat named the Jetta D motored up to the SPC dock to offload fresh Silvers.

Rather than tossed whole into a slimy hold, the fish were packed in ice after being bled and dressed at sea. Instead of being sucked out of the boat by a giant vacuum hose, the silvers were unpacked, one-by-one, and then placed on a conveyor belt. Each fish was washed, weighed, and checked with a digital thermometer. “The target [temperature] is close to freezing, but not below,” said Shoemaker. “Thirty-three or 34 degrees [Fahrenheit] is ideal. Above 40 is unacceptable.”

The salmon coming off the Jetta D registered 33.2 to 33.7 degrees. Perfect. Next SPC workers carried the mint-bright Silvers to a long, stainless steel table. Processing line hands removed the heads, and then used machines with rolling bristles to clean out the body cavities. Next they slid the fish down the line to a finishing station where workers used small knives to clean away membranes and remove any remaining shreds of viscera.

Finally, the fish were fileted. Some of the filets were packaged to be shipped fresh on Alaska Air Cargo on the 6:30 a.m. flight the next morning. The rest were placed on racks, then rolled into an industrial freezer and “flash frozen” for eight hours at negative 35 Fahrenheit air temperature, bringing the core temperature of the salmon to about 15 degrees below zero.

An SPC worker processes fresh silvers

There was higher demand than usual for Silver filets this fall. For the third time in the last 30 years, the world famous Bristol Bay Sockeye run, centered about 800 miles west of Sitka, had come in almost a month later than usual. The fish were so late that many of the biggest salmon processors in the Bristol Bay region had assumed the run was a bust and laid off most of their seasonal workforce.

The run was not a bust. Far from it. Bristol Bay commercial fishermen harvested about 58 million pounds of Sockeye. (The Bristol Bay Sockeye run is the largest salmon run the world.) Because many processors had cut their labor force, however, they didn’t have the manpower to create filets. Instead most of the Bristol Bay sockeye this year was brought to market “H&G,” meaning a whole fish, headed and gutted.

“Bristol Bay couldn’t keep up with the demand for wild salmon filets,” Shoemaker said. “They had a huge, compressed run with a tight peak, and they were caught off guard. The end result was a shortage of filets all through July and August, which helps our business in September.”

After emerging from the freezer, the silver filets were packed in 30-pound fixed weight insulated boxes that are shipped by barge to the Lower 48 and sometimes overseas

“The Europeans, especially the French, really like our silvers, because they buy them frozen and smoke them at home,” Shoemaker said. “They like a bigger filet than you get with a typical Sockeye, because salmon loses a lot of weight when it’s being smoked.”

SPC shipped more than a million pounds of salmon a year with Alaska Air Cargo

From the SPC plant, salmon that’s shipped fresh is transported to the Alaska Airlines Cargo facility at Sitka Rocky Gutierrez Airport, where they’re loaded into Unit Load Devices or ULDs, also known as “Igloos.” These special air freight containers are designed to ensure the fish arrives cold at its final destination, whether that’s Anchorage, New York, or Paris.

“Cold fish equals happy customers,” said Shannon Stevens, Regional Cargo Sales Manager for Alaska Airlines. Stevens oversees the Alaska Air Cargo shipping of all seafood from southeast Alaska.

"Cold fish equals happy customers."

Later on the same picturesque day in Sitka that Shoemaker offered a tour of the seafood co-op plant, Stevens watched as boxes of fresh silvers were loaded into the cargo hold of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400. “The key to doing my job well is knowing the fish, knowing how the runs are doing,” Stevens said. “In order to bring the processors the planes they need, when they need them, I need to know, Hey, are the Kings late this year? How are the Silvers doing? What’s going on with the Chums?”

Wild salmon goes from Alaska's waters to the world in less than 48 hours

The salmon being loaded into the cargo jet were headed for restaurants in Boston. “From the time they were tendered in Sitka to their arriving at the restaurant where they will be served will be no more than 48 hours,” Stevens said. “We care about salmon at Alaska Airlines. We’re Alaskans, too. We love to eat salmon, too. We understand that salmon is not just a product. It’s a precious natural resource. And it’s food. So we move quickly but carefully, and we minimize the impact of transporting it [salmon] to the rest of the world.”

With a roar, and a belly full of wild Alaska salmon, the 737 took off and disappeared into skies as blue as the ocean below.

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