It will not be easy, but the Alaska commercial seafood industry needs to figure out how to turn a 25-cent-per-pound pink salmon into a fish worth 45 cents a pound.
That math lesson came from Jeremy Woodrow, executive director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.
“What everyone is talking about is how do we make more value out of our fish,” Woodrow said during a panel discussion at the midwinter meeting of the Southeast Conference.
The marketing agency has succeeded in establishing wild Alaska seafood as a premium brand, he said, with consumers willing to pay more for a quality product. But there is a limit to how much they will pay, and the competition sells at lower prices.
Cheaper seafoods from Russia and farmed salmon can easily undercut wild Alaska products in the store, taking market share among price-conscious shoppers.
The Rebuilding Southeast Fisheries and Seafood Modernization panelists at the conference in Juneau talked about the need to get more value out of each fish harvested in Alaska to improve the financial viability of the industry.
“I have not seen such an accumulation of events,” all stacked up against Alaska, said panel member Markos Scheer, who has been in the seafood industry for more than 30 years. Scheer now serves as chief executive officer of Seagrove Kelp, a mariculture operation near Craig.
“Russia is offloading at rock-bottom prices that we can’t compete with,” Woodrow said.
Though then-President Joe Biden in 2024 banned the entry of Russian seafood into the U.S., Russian products are moving into other markets, making it harder on Alaska to compete overseas.
U.S. distributors loaded up on Russian products before the 2024 ban took effect but that inventory mostly has been sold off, creating an opportunity for Alaska to win market share, Woodrow said. Other suppliers, however, see the same opportunity and will compete strongly for the business.
The majority of Alaska seafood is exported, he said. Alaska marketers lost much of their sales in China after a tariff war started in 2018 under the first Trump administration.
“The U.S.-China trade war has displaced $500 million of Alaska seafood,” Woodrow told Alaska legislators in 2022.
“There is no other single China in the world,” he said at the panel discussion on Feb. 11, discussing the imperative to boost sales in multiple other markets to make up for the loss in China.
“There are a lot of economic factors that have come together over several years that have had a negative impact on the (Alaska) seafood industry,” Woodrow said.
In addition to facing off against lower-cost competition, the industry needs a lot of capital investment to build up its ability to handle, process and earn more value from each fish.
A legislative task force created last year to look for answers submitted its final report last month. It included recommendations for the state to offer tax incentives to companies to encourage development of new products and markets to get more value out of fish, such as protein powder, nutritional supplements and fish oil.
“A big part of the value is quality,” said Julie Decker, president of the Pacific Seafood Processors Association. But it’s much harder to produce a consistent, quality product in the operation of wild fisheries than in the controlled environment of a fish farm, she said.
“Ninety percent of the salmon consumed in the world is farmed,” said panelist Scott Wagner, general manager of the nonprofit hatchery operator Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association.
The volume coming from salmon farms is growing, and that is a problem for Alaska, he said.
Prices for pink and chum salmon in Alaska have been so low the past couple of years that many nonprofit hatchery operations did not earn enough to fully meet their cost-recovery needs, he said.
“We’re looking at strong returns in 2025,” which will help with volume, but better prices are needed too.
“Stability is what the industry needs now,” Wagner said.
After first needing to stabilize its finances, the industry then needs to grow by innovation and developing new products, Decker said.
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