
National Seafood Month allows the U.S. West Coast seafood community to promote its products, sustainable fishing practices and the humanity behind each catch.
For the U.S. seafood community, October is more than Halloween and pumpkin lattes. It’s a celebration of seafood and all it has to offer.
And while many companies and organizations consider promoting seafood a year-long endeavor, they also view the heightened attention around National Seafood Month as a unique opportunity to raise awareness of seafood products, sustainable practices and the fishing families that make their livelihoods on what they catch.
“When it comes to seafood, in October and beyond the message is health—personal health and ecological health that makes seafood available now and for future generations,” said Kayla Bennett, manager of media and communications for the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), a nonprofit focused on educating the public about seafood safety, sustainability and nutrition.
NFI, which also celebrates National Pescatarian Month as a complement to National Seafood Month, offers a Dish on Fish blog that hosts seafood recipes for people to try during the month of October and throughout the year.
“Beyond just highlighting seafood, it challenges folks to try something new that is delicious and a clear commitment to health,” Bennett said.
Monterey Bay Aquarium in Northern California is using this year’s National Seafood Month to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its Seafood Watch program, which was launched in 1999 after the public expressed interest in having more information about sustainable seafood.
Since then, Seafood Watch has been assessing major fisheries and aquaculture operations that supply the U.S. market, comparing them to its standards for sustainable fisheries and aquaculture. The color-coded ratings help consumers determine whether they should purchase or avoid a product.
Since December 2023, Seafood Watch said, it has completed 681 assessments, which has resulted in a cumulative 5,711 recommendations encompassing 431 species.
Seafood Watch started a 10-month campaign in March, partnering with dieticians at Food + Planet and The Food is Medicine Institute of Tufts University on the Super Green List, which tells consumers which species they can eat in good conscience.
Seafood Watch also plans to spread the word about sustainable seafood on college campuses and other locations.
“They’re sort of going to help us amplify the message of sustainable seafood that month,” said Seafood Watch Outreach Manager Corbett Nash.
Promoting Alaskan Seafood
The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, the marketing arm of the state’s seafood industry, plans to run a robust campaign to promote Alaska products for National Seafood Month, said Tracy Welch, executive director of United Fishermen of Alaska, which works with ASMI.
The organization is partnering with some of its retail partners on traditional in-store promotions that feature a wide range of wild Alaska seafood species. ASMI is also working with smaller e-commerce companies such as online seafood company Sizzle Fish to draw in new consumers to the Alaska seafood category, Welch said.
ASMI is joining with Costco on a Quick & Easy recipe video, the company’s video series featuring recipes that typically have five ingredients or less and are appealing to shoppers looking for a healthy and delicious meal to cook for their families.
The recipes, showcased on flatscreen televisions in Costco warehouses nationwide, have been hugely popular in past years, she said.
Welch added that Alaska seafood is featured as a recipe of the month in the Costco Connection, which reaches more than 15 million readers and is the fourth highest circulated magazine in the U.S., according to the retailer.
ASMI is creating a wild Alaska pollock recipe to add to the collection for National Seafood Month.
Alaska Seafood is also sponsoring the Southern Smoke Festival in Houston on Oct. 5. The festival attracts Michelin-starred and James Beard Award-winning chefs across the country, several of whom are working with wild Alaska seafood.
“This is an amazing opportunity to have some of the most talented chefs in the world become familiar with wild Alaska seafood and naturally develop an affinity for it and fall in love with it,” Welch said. “The chefs preparing the Alaska seafood were thrilled to utilize such incredible product from Alaska.”
The relationships cultivated with the chefs resulted in chef missions to Alaska, incorporating the state’s seafood in their restaurants’ menus and sharing Alaska seafood content on their social channels. Many of these chefs are now members of the Alaska Seafood Culinary Alliance, which features ASMI chef ambassadors, Welch said.
Meanwhile, major Alaska flatfish producers in January formed the Wild Alaska Sole Association, a new nonprofit organization dedicated to marketing wild Alaska sole in U.S. and global markets.
WASA boasts members such as Fishermen’s Finest, North Star Fishing, Ocean Peace, O’Hara Corporation and U.S. Seafoods, and associate members like Glacier Fish Company and American Seafoods.
“Alaska flatfish is the second largest federally-managed fishery in Alaska and it’s the largest flatfish fishery in the world, so Alaska really could play a more dominant role in markets around the world,” WASA Executive Director Pat Shanahan said.
“But, until now,” Shanahan added, “the industry hasn’t really gotten together to look at those opportunities and see how they might be able to take advantage of them.”
WASA has been focused on analyzing the domestic market and key markets in Europe where they traditionally eat flatfish, Shanahan said. She added that the organization plans to launch its website and officially introduce its brand around the time of National Seafood Month, while also talking to customers in the marketplace about promotions.
“We just feel that WASA will also be able to give additional exposure to flatfish and bring more awareness,” she said. “We know that people like Alaska flatfish when they taste it. If they know it, they really love it. They’re just not aware of it. It’s not something that’s in their consciousness. We really need to get out there and expose more consumers to it so it’s on the options for them to consider.”
Facing Challenges
Plans for National Seafood Month are proceeding against the backdrop of some challenges facing sectors of the U.S. West Coast seafood industry, which has been impacted by inflation, restaurant closures, foreign competition and climate change.
For example, the Oregon Capital Chronicle, which covers state government news, reported that the Oregon Department of Agriculture has had to close oyster, razor clam and other fisheries because of toxins.
In June, federal lawmakers from Oregon wrote to USDA Administrator Bruce Summers, who is in charge of the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, urging him to support the commodity purchase of Oregon seafood, specifically West Coast whiting and rockfish filets.
“Expanded USDA partnerships with the West Coast seafood industry in 2024 would help to significantly mitigate the impacts of the pandemic on the restaurant industry and disruptions in international trade, both of which have exacerbated the strain on domestic demand for the Oregon seafood industry’s valuable products,” the letter states.
Seafood is vital for future food security, said Linda Cornish, founder and president of the Seafood Nutrition Partnership, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of the nutritional benefits of seafood.
“With the world’s population estimated to grow to 9-to-10 billion people by 2050 and the limited arable land and fresh water resources, we need to look to the oceans for our food and nutrition,” Cornish said.
“The seafood industry faces many challenges and they are important to address to ensure we have a vital food source for human health (and) good jobs for economic health, and (that) seafood has a lighter footprint for planetary health,” she added.
For National Seafood Month, Seafood Nutrition Partnership and Publix Super Markets are teaming up to run an integrated cross-platform, in-store and digital “Fall in Love with Seafood” campaign to promote seafood, she said.
The campaign “combines SNP’s mission to encourage consumers to eat more seafood for improved health with product features that support retailers and suppliers across the country,” Cornish explained.
NOAA’s Plans
As it does annually during National Seafood Month, NOAA Fisheries plans to highlight operations that help bring healthy, sustainable seafood to consumers through the agency’s Sustainable Seafood webpage, while also noting any new developments related to the National Seafood Strategy, which was released in August 2023 and highlights services provided to support the seafood sector, and outlines ways its resilience can be enhanced in the face of climate change and other stressors.
NOAA Fisheries also funds projects that benefit U.S. fisheries and seafood communities through the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant program.
Recipients include the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, which in July revealed that it was awarded $500,000 to fund an effort with partners to “capture the current value-added products being made in Alaska and compare them with successful products developed in Iceland to determine which could be applied to Alaska seafood processes and species, as well as the re-shoring of some processing to the U.S.”
Grant recipients include Fishful Future, which aims to support San Diego residents seeking connectivity to the local seafood system, especially younger consumers and women, and Get Hooked, a community-supported fishery based in Santa Barbara that offers a subscription-based service that benefits both the consumer and the fishermen.
Operated by business partners Victoria Voss and Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara Executive Director Kim Selkoe, Get Hooked has been raising seafood awareness through its subscription model for the last five years, working with local fishermen and processing their fish before sending it out to subscribers.
Each delivery comes with information about who caught the fish, how it was caught, the fishing method, the sustainability of that species and other facts and tips.
“It’s harder for folks to go straight to the fishermen, and so we’re playing that middleman gap space where it’s really about extreme traceability that you just don’t get very often when you’re trying to buy fish,” said Voss, who grew up in a fishing family and did some commercial fishing herself in Alaska.
Further down the coast in Southern California, Fishful Future, a not-for-profit education initiative, is using its $300,000 grant to run its educational campaign on the social media platforms Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest.
“There’s a strategic element to all of this in that we hope to capture the interest, the hearts and minds of young people who are very much interested and concerned with the impacts of their food choices these days; they also represent the future buying power,” said Emily Miller, director of Fishful Future and a staff research associate with the California Sea Grant.
Meanwhile, Pinterest’s female presence is a chance to reach women, she said.
“We would really like to capture more of that market sector attention for local seafood products because it seems women are still the predominant purchasers of food in the home in the U.S. in 2024,” Miller said.
Fishful Future wants to close the knowledge gaps that many local consumers struggle with when it comes to purchasing and preparing local fish, while helping to support local commercial fishing.
“The local commercial fishing community is very much looking for ways to increase its direct marketing capacity, so that they can have a more diverse marketplace from wholesalers, which are still a very important component of the San Diego seafood system,” Miller said.
“It’s just a win-win situation,” she added, “because then local commercial fishers can offer their products for a lower price point directly to the public, and then the public gets to enjoy a super biodiverse and just incredibly high quality product.”
Karen Robes Meeks can be reached at karen@maritimepublishing.com