Saving Seafood

How apps and markets are changing direct seafood sales

March 17 2025 — Apps, online markets, and in–person markets are connecting fishermen and customers.

The Covid pandemic boosted direct marketing of seafood, with some fishermen tripling their sales and others getting into direct sales for the first time. In the wake of the pandemic, many fishermen want to continue to capitalize on consumers’ desire to access high-quality seafood, and a number of app developers, online markets, and live markets are providing them with ways to continue making direct sales.

Landon Hill, of Wilmington, N.C., got the idea for a marketing app for fish—a sort of Tinder App for connecting fishermen with fish buyers—while finishing business school at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.“After I graduated, I kept playing with the idea. I don’t have a lot of background in fisheries, but I could see that the lack of communication was a real pain point in fishing communities. I mean the idea that Tidewater restaurants were getting supplied by 18-wheelers just didn’t make sense to me, and it didn’t make sense to the chefs in those restaurants.”

Hill wants his app, Local Catch, to facilitate communication in the seafood market. To do that, he breaks the players down into four categories: fishermen, dealers, restaurants, and consumers. “You can register on the app and put in your zip code to see what’s available, or as a dealer or fisherman what you have available. As a consumer you can also make a cast, as we call it, and ask for what you are looking for.”

Hill reiterates that the project is about facilitating communication in the seafood industry. “We’re want people to know what seafood is for sale in their areas, and we’re exploring ways to do that better,” he says. “We’ve updated the app about 70 times since we released it to the public in 2022, and we’llprobably update it 70 more times in the next two years. Right now, we have 1,300 users in the app, and we’re on all coasts of the continental U.S.”

Hill adds that Local Catch is currently adding capacity for customers to pay vendors in the app using PayPal. “The other thing we’re looking at is distribution. That’s been on our white board since we started.” Right now, Local Catch connects buyers and sellers and leaves them to iron out the details of whether the vendor will deliver, or the buyer will pick up.

Whether the app can generate revenue is an open question. “Last year we received a NCIDEA grant, but before that I was bootstrapping everything with other work,” says Hill. “We’ll collect a small service fee when buyers use PayPal in the app and we’re exploring other revenue streams. Right now we just want to make it work, and we’re keeping it free.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Buy Local Fish

March 25, 2020 — Local and domestic sources of wild American seafood shipped to you or available locally for pick-up. The top listing is all domestic seafood suppliers who will ship anywhere in the country. Below that, find listings for all local suppliers by state. Both are listed in alphabetical order.

Don’t see your company? Submit your info here.

Find more community supported fisheries and local direct marketers at Local Catch.

*All suppliers are listed based on information submitted by the suppliers themselves and have not been endorsed, verified or vetted by National Fisherman.

SHIPPED TO YOU

Atlantic Sea Farms
Saco, ME

Fresh-frozen and fermented Maine kelp
Delivering to the Continental U.S.
Food Service and Retail available!

Contact: Jesse Baines
(207) 807-9185
jbaines@atlanticseafarms.com
atlanticseafarms.com
89 Industrial Park Road, Saco, Maine 04072

Product List:
Ready-Cut Kelp
Kelp Cubes
Fermented Seaweed Salad
Sea-Chi
Sea-Beet Kraut

Bristol Bay Wild
Sitka, AK

Bristol Bay sockeye

Delivered anywhere, click for local deliveries and pick-ups

Contact: Lilani Estacio
lilani@bbrsda.com
(907) 677-2371
P.O. Box 6386
Sitka, AK 99835
find.bristolbaysockeye.org

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Local Catch hosts discussion on supply chain issues in wake of Sea to Table expose

October 9, 2018 — Local Catch, a community-of-practice made up of fishermen, organizers, researchers, and consumers, had its first webinar in a series exploring the implications of the Associated Press story on Sea to Table.

That story, which was published in June, accused the company of falsifying the origins of its seafood and potentially being linked to slave labor in Indonesia. Given the overlap in mission between Sea to Table and a number of other fishing organizations and nonprofits, Local Catch’s first webinar – titled “Slow Fish 201: Good, clean, fair seafood supply chains” – was focused on discussing what other suppliers can do counteract any negative publicity, and how they can ensure they avoid similar pitfalls.

“What is the overall impact of the Sea to Table Story?” said Colles Stowell, moderator of the discussion and the founder of One Fish Foundation.

Coordinator of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance Brett Tolley said that the accusations levied against Sea to Table, and the adoption of similar policies by many organizations, are an inevitable symptom of the rising interest by consumers in the sustainability and origins of their seafood. The Slow Fish movement, at its core, developed as a way to connect people to harvesters and smaller fishing communities.

“The popularity of this model is giving rise to co-optation,” Tolley said. He pointed to the Fulton Fish Market, which re-branded itself with the moniker “community supported fishery,” which Tolley said is at odds with the smaller, local seafood driven model of Slow Fish.

Challenges in supplying sustainable fish with a known origin story are also not new to  TwoXSea co-founder Innokenty Belov. Belov – who first got into the sustainable seafood business with his San Francisco, California-based restaurant “Fish. Restaurant” – has witnessed firsthand how supply chains can be muddied and difficult to navigate.

“We would have local fishermen bringing us seafood, and we would be able to tell the story of those men and women and what they did every day to bring that bounty into our kitchen,” Belov said of the early days of the restaurant. “There was not nearly enough fish being caught in our local area, being caught in the way we wanted it to be caught.”

That meant going to wholesalers. Belov recounted one wholesaler that provided him with yellowfin tuna for fish tacos, which was reportedly from a boat out of the Marshall Islands.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Dock to Dish Prepares New Seafood-Tracking System

February 8, 2018 — It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your shipments of iced-down, black sea bass are? Or perhaps you want to check on the status of the longline boat that is catching your carton of golden tilefish from the 500-foot depths of the Hudson Canyon, located about 80 miles south of Montauk? For those who demand the freshest, most sustainable seafood, and partake in the increasingly popular and expanding Montauk-headquartered Dock to Dish community-supported fishery program, keeping an eye on your seafood order is a simple mouse click away.

“More and more people want to know where, when, and how their fish are caught,” explained Sean Barrett, a fisherman and restaurateur who founded the cooperative fishery program in 2012. “Our motto is ‘know your fisherman’ and that has not changed. Members of Dock to Dish can check in real time the status of their catch from the beginning of the fishing trip all the way until it is delivered by hand right to their doorstep. It’s just one of the many enhancements we have made since we started.”

This year Mr. Barrett hopes to improve the fishery marketplace by having the world’s first live tracking dashboard so that end consumers on land can monitor hauls of wild seafood from individual fishermen at sea in near-real time. Named Dock to Dish 2.0, the new technology bundle was created in partnership with several fish tracking companies, including Pelagic Data Systems, Local Catch, and Fish Trax. Once completed, the bundle will be open-sourced, meaning it can be replicated and used by all independent small and medium-scale fisheries operations around the world.

“Dock to Dish 2.0 is the first public-facing system to ever combine vessel and vehicle tracking with geospatial monitoring technologies on an interactive digital dashboard,” Mr. Barrett explained last month as he unloaded a catch of tilefish just outside the kitchen door of Nick and Toni’s, one of the first members of Dock to Dish’s restaurant-supported fisheries program. Fishing boats will be outfitted with solar-powered automatic data-collection monitors and application-specific wireless sensors.

Read the full story at the East Hampton Star

 

Rhode Island Fishing Industry Looks To Grow Local Demand Amid Changing Regulations

April 11, 2017 — Fishing has long been a staple industry in Rhode Island. Over the last century ever more local seafood is shipped across the country and the globe. Now, fishermen are working to grow the local market in the face of changing regulations and technology.

The Pawtucket indoor farmer’s market is bustling on a recent Saturday morning. Among the rows of vendors selling veggies, eggs, and homemade soaps is the Local Catch – purveyor of locally caught seafood. Laid out over shaved ice are fish like dabs, a type of flounder, John Dory, and Monkfish. It’s all readily available in local waters. Yet Rhode Islanders might be hard-pressed to find them in a neighborhood grocery store.

“Before we started the Local Catch I fished for about 35 years with my own boat,” said Local Catch owner Richard Cook. “We went to a couple fish markets at Stop and Shops and stuff like that and nobody had any local fish it was all from Alaska and China and all over the place.”

So Cook is working to grow local demand for a wider variety of fish. And that could benefit thousands of workers. The state supported some 5,000 commercial fishing jobs as recently as 2012, according the State Department of Environmental Management. That same DEM report found the state did $200 million dollars in commercial sales that year. Cook says that number could be higher, but fishermen are struggling with catch limits. Those are imposed by state and federal officials to protect the health of certain fish species.

One of the more popular local fish, cod has a catch limit of 1,000 pounds per boat, per day. So Cook and others are hoping other fish like scup will catch on. Scup – also known as porgy – can be found in Rhode Island waters, but has a catch limit of 50,000 pounds per boat per day.

Read the full story at Rhode Island Public Radio