Workers sort headed-and-gutted salmon at the Trident seafood processing plant in Naknek in Bristol Bay in July 2022. The company will be "retiring or seeking buyers" for the plant as it restructures its Alaska operations.
Seattle-based Trident Seafoods will scale back its operations in an economically challenging global market and wants to sell several of its facilities in Alaska, including processing plants in Petersburg and Ketchikan, but the company plans to keep its Wrangell operation.
"Wrangell is a highly efficient plant that makes products that feed our value-added salmon operations," Alexis Telfer, vice president for global communications at Trident, reported in an email Dec. 12.
"Petersburg is a smaller, multi-species plant, and perfect for someone who will direct-market every fish."
Trident bought the downtown waterfront Wrangell plant about 14 years ago. It can handle up to 750,000 pounds of fish per day, which is almost four times the volume of the Petersburg plant, according to the company's website.
The Ketchikan plant, with canning lines in addition to freezing lines, is the company's largest operation in Southeast.
Trident this past summer operated its Wrangell plant for the first time since 2019, employing up to120 workers to clean and freeze headed-and-gutted pinks and chums.
"The plan for Wrangell is solid for 2024," Telfer said.
Citing difficult global market conditions, the largest seafood company in the U.S. announced Dec. 12 that it is looking to reduce its operations and cut its total workforce by 10%.
Trident intends to remain competitive by focusing on wild Alaska seafood - while also aggressively reducing costs and improving productivity, the company's statement said.
"We are modernizing and retooling the remaining Alaska plants to be more efficient, effective and sustainable operations," said Jeff Welbourn, Trident's senior vice president of Alaska operations.
"Trident's vision is to grow a value-added, consumer-driven future for the company, and we need to focus the investments and build the products that support that," Telfer said in an email. "Wrangell is included in the plans to continue modernizing our Alaska plants. It's still in the early days and we'll be talking with the fleet and community as we get the projects outlined."
Trident will look for buyers for its nearly year-round operations in Kodiak, which can handle up to 1.5 million pounds of pollock a day, and seasonal plants in Ketchikan, Petersburg and False Pass in the eastern Aleutian Islands, according to the company statement.
The company will also be "retiring or seeking buyers" for other assets, including the historic South Naknek Diamond NN cannery in the Bristol Bay region, and facilities in Chignik on the Alaska Peninsula.
The family-owned company is the largest seafood processor in the state, with plants in 11 communities. It has operated in Alaska for more than 50 years.
The changes are part of a major restructuring in Alaska that will allow Trident to focus on its remaining assets as the company and other U.S. seafood producers face headwinds on the world market, the Dec. 12 announcement said. Declining demand, excess supply and foreign competition have pushed down prices, squeezed profits and displaced U.S. producers from established markets, the statement said.
"Many of our foreign competitors operate with minimal regulatory costs and oversight, inexpensive infrastructure and exploitive labor practices," Trident chief executive Joe Bundrant said in the company's announcement.
Privately owned Trident employs 9,000 people in six countries, mostly in the U.S. In addition to Wrangell and the Alaska operations it is looking to sell, the company has seafood plants in Cordova, Akutan, Sand Point and St. Paul in the Bering Sea.
In August, Trident announced it would delay its three-year plan to build a processing plant at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands to replace its aging facility in nearby Akutan. Construction will likely begin again after the company's restructuring plans are completed, the Dec. 12 statement said.
In Kodiak, the company will look for a buyer for its operations that handle multiple species, primarily pollock, salmon, Pacific cod and crab, the company said.
Julie Bonney, head of Alaska Groundfish Data Bank in Kodiak, said Trident's moves are a sign of the difficulties in the Alaska seafood industry. Low prices across a variety of species are hurting fishermen, she said.
"It demonstrates how bad the market is for all Alaska seafood," she said. "Every fishery in the state of Alaska is facing huge challenges, in terms of the ability to move product into the marketplace."
Bonney said tariffs and other trade sanctions on U.S. products, along with increasing costs and unfair competition from Russian seafood, are additional factors hurting the industry. "The processing sector is reacting to that," she said. "They have to. They are a business."
The Anchorage Daily News contributed reporting for this story.
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