October 9, 2019 — Everyone was up early this Sunday. But it wasn’t to go fishing. It was to attend the third Local Catch Summit, an educational conference for entrepreneurial seafood folks in Portland, Ore.
This year was the first year the Local Catch Network has hosted an event on the West Coast (East Coast events include the 2012 National Summit on Community Supported Fisheries in Portsmouth, N.H., and the 2016 Local Seafood Summit in Norfolk, Va.). The summit aims to bring together harvesters and businesses interested in sharing experiential knowledge, learning strategies that make community supported fisheries and direct-marketing businesses successful.
Aside from a few committed folks involved with Local Catch who made the trek from the East Coast to support the summit, the majority of the 100-plus attendees were Pacific fishermen and seafood representatives connecting with the network for the first time.
This year’s series of workshops was focused on three tracks: The Business of CSFs; Marketing, Branding, and Developing Supply Chain Relationships; and Environment and Resilience.