December 5, 2022 — Ben Blakey is the CEO of Sitka, Alaska, U.S.A.-based Northline Seafoods, which announced on 30 November, 2022, it is planning to build a floating salmon-processing platform to operate in Alaska’s Bristol Bay.
SeafoodSource: What is your background in the seafood industry and why did you pursue this project?
Blakey: I grew up working in Bristol Bay. My family had a processor, Snowpack Products, that operated from the early 1980s until it was sold to Icicle [Seafoods] in 2012. So basically, since I could walk, I’ve been involved in Alaska’s fishing industry. I grew up from mending nets to buying and operating fishing boats. I’ve worked in fleet management. Then I did some work in processing. My life’s work has been in Bristol Bay’s fishing industry.
SeafoodSource: How does Northine Seafoods’ new vessel, the Hannah, fit into Bristol Bay’s salmon supply chain?
Blakey: It’s a floating fish-processing platform, primarily focused on quickly freezing the fish. We won’t do any value-added processing in Bristol Bay, we will just buy fish from fishermen and take fish from tenders and then we’ll freeze them immediately in whole, round form. We’re not heading or gutting them, we’re just trying to stabilize them as quickly as possible, so that when they are thawed out that they’re in as fresh of a state as possible. What that means is we’re going to have a smaller labor footprint. We will be able to do 750,000 to a million pounds of fish a day with 23 people working on the floor. So it will be extremely efficient from a labor perspective. In addition, we won’t use standardized container transport. Currently, the vast majority of frozen salmon leaving Alaska end up in 40-foot frozen containers. We will instead just store them inside of our barge, which can carry north of 14 million pounds of frozen product. So those will be shipping costs that we don’t have to pay. Instead, we will just haul the entire barge south back to the Pacific Northwest after the salmon season, meaning the barge will act as a consolidated or integrated shipping option. We will store the fish on the vessel until we plan to have them processed or they go to market. With the barge acting effectively as a cold storage facility, that will mean there’s far less movement of the product – we won’t have to transport it on trucks through ports, forklift them around or tuck them into cold storage.
SeafoodSource: Are you going to be contracting with tenders or local fishermen?
Blakey: No, we will have our own dedicated fleet. And we will hire and utilize our own tenders to help serve the fleet and provide buying access.
SeafoodSource: With the uptick in fish being caught in Bristol Bay in recent years, is this additional storage and processing capacity necessary there?
Blakey: There is a need for it. Last year was an extremely large run, which saw an excess of capacity and an excess of what existing processors could freeze. But aside from the run size, there were issues with other parts of the supply chain, including a shortage of containers, and there’s been a shortage of cold storage nationwide, and trucking fees have gone up substantially since the start of the [Covid-19] pandemic.
Beyond there being a need for it, we are simplifying and making the supply chain more efficient. One major part of that will be our use of integrated ultra-low temperature facilities, freezing and story all of our products at negative 25 degrees Fahrenheit, which allows it to be extremely fresh when it’s thawed out and reprocessed in the lower 48 [U.S. states]