A New York food bank was offered a huge donation of fresh fish last month — but it came with a catch.
LocalCoho, a going-out-of-business salmon farm in the small upstate city of Auburn, New York, wanted to give 40,000 pounds of coho salmon to the Food Bank of Central New York, a motherlode of high-quality protein that could feed thousands of families.
But the fish were still alive and swimming in the farm’s giant indoor tanks. The organizations would need to figure out how to get some 13,000 salmon from the water and then have them processed into frozen fillets for distribution to food pantries. And they’d need to do it fast, before the business closed for good. LocalCoho ceased operations Jan. 31.
Thanks to dozens of food pantry volunteers willing to help staffers scoop up the salmon, the team was able to empty the tanks in a matter of weeks and cold pack tons of fish for shipment to a processor.
“The fact that we only had weeks to execute this really ratcheted up the intensity and the anxiety a little bit,” said Brian McManus, the food bank’s chief operations officer. “I knew that we had the will. I knew we had the expertise.”
LocalCoho was a startup that had been piloting a sustainable salmon farming system employing recirculated water. Its facility west of Syracuse had been supplying coho salmon to wholesalers and retailers, including high-end Manhattan sushi restaurants, with the goal of building regional farms across the country.
But company officials said they could not raise enough capital to expand and become profitable. Thus, they decided to wrap things up at the end of January. With a shutdown looming, farm manager Adam Kramarsyck said they didn’t want the fish to go to waste or end up as biofuel. That’s when they reached out to see if the fish could be donated as food.
LocalCoho can process about 600 fish a week by hand. But there was less than a month to clear the tanks of many times that number of fish.
Enter the food bank. McManus was excited by the offer to land so many fish — and nervous about the challenge. But while the Syracuse-based operation knew how to distribute canned or frozen seafood, they’re not set up to handle fresh fish. How could they turn thousands of fish into frozen fillets in a tight time frame? Kramarsyck said it took “tons and tons of logistics.”
The food bank enlisted 42 volunteers to help out. A business with refrigerated trucks offered to ship the fish for free to a processor an hour away in Rochester. And LocalCoho staff pitched in to get the job done in time.
The salmon was processed and quick-frozen for distribution among 243 food pantries, as well as soup kitchens, shelters and other institutions in the food bank’s network.
The catch is expected to yield more than 26,000 servings of hard-to-source protein for the hungry.
“Protein, animal protein is very, very desirable. We know that people need it for nourishment and it’s difficult to get. And so this is going to make a very large impact,” said McManus.
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