April 1, 2020 — For Roger Dang, president of Fresh Island Fish, navigating business amid fallout from the coronavirus crisis means tapping into a different set of sensibilities.
“We need to look at the whole picture with our whole hearts and our whole minds,” he said.
At his company this means putting Hawaii fish directly into the hands of the public.
The objective: to get fishing boats back out on the ocean and help keep Hawaii’s fishing industry afloat. More on that later.
Fresh Island Fish wholesales to hotels and restaurants, which means it has a lot of inventory with few places to send it. So, since March 21, it has been selling this bounty direct to the public at unheard-of prices. Early Monday morning on Instagram, for instance, it listed 5 pounds of ahi for $4 per pound and 5 pounds of marlin and hebi at $3 per pound.
Sales take place curbside at Pier 38, initially creating a traffic jam along Nimitz Highway. The company was unprepared for the response. Consider that its first announcement was “a Microsoft flyer — we’re not social media people, we’re fish people,” said Dang. “We didn’t expect more than 50 people. We had a small tent outside our facility and saw a line of more than 100 cars.”