Trident Seafoods reduced its workforce earlier this month to one shift of about 100 workers. The company said its Wrangell plant will continue cleaning, packing and shipping salmon through the end of August or the first week of September.

The cutback from two shifts was “a little earlier than expected,” said Alexis Telfer, vice president for global communications and marketing for Seattle-based Trident Seafoods.

“The challenge was primarily pinks,” she said in an email last week.

The plant handles pink and chum salmon, mostly freezing headed-and-gutted fish in past years.

This summer’s pink salmon harvest in Southeast Alaska has come in more than 20% below preseason forecasts from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

The department had forecast the Southeast pink salmon commercial harvest at 29 million fish but, as of a week ago, the actual catch was projected at 23 million, and the department reported that even “this reduced estimate may be difficult to achieve.”

As of Aug. 15, the total Southeast pink salmon catch was just over 17 million fish, with about 16.5 million netted by seiners and the rest pulled in by gillnetters.

“The pink salmon run is past peak historical harvest timing and some areas have been closed for the remainder of the season,” Fish and Game reported on Aug. 22.

The 2023 pink salmon harvest in Southeast totaled almost 48 million fish. Pinks return on two-year cycles at sea, making this year’s below-forecast returns particularly disappointing to the industry after the strong harvest two years ago.

The Department of Fish and Game reports average prices paid to commercial salmon fishermen, but the numbers were not available for pink salmon last week and usually come after the season closes.

The Wrangell plant, which Trident bought about 15 years ago, is the company’s only seafood processing facility in Southeast. It sold its operations in Ketchikan and Petersburg last year, along with plants in the Aleutian Islands and Kodiak as it downsized its presence in the state after a couple of years of weak seafood prices and tough market conditions.

The company reopened the Wrangell plant in 2023 after a three-year closure during the worst of the pandemic shutdowns and weak salmon runs, particularly chum, that limited the volume available for processing.