The secret is in the batch code printed on the back of each packet of Fishpeople’s product packets, on display at Fred Meyer, Albertsons, Whole Foods and other chain stores in the Pacific Northwest, California and Alaska.
Fishpeople, which first put its product on grocery shelves in late 2012, plans to open its own processing facility at Toledo, Oregon in July, to process Chinook salmon, albacore tuna and razor clams, said Jodie Emmett, brand manager. The plant is currently under construction, and hiring has not yet commenced. Fishpeople currently employs seven people full time, plus some part time workers, she said.
Take the Chinook Salmon in a Chardonnay Reduction Sauce, for example.
The message on the back of the colorful seven ounce packet says ingredients include fall run Columbia River Chinook freshly poached and swimming in a fine light cream sauce of dill and sweet onions grown on Northwest farms, with capers and a splash of Cooper Mountain Chardonnay.
But type the 7-digit batch code stamped on the packet into the fishpeople website, www.fishpeopleseafood.com, and you’ll learn, as fishpeople says, “the juicy truth behind our ingredients.”
The Chinook salmon, which began and ended its journey on the Columbia River, a hatchery born fish released into the wild at a few months of age, “headed to Alaska for a few years until it felt the primal urge to return to its homeland and reproduce,” the web page advises. “After completing the journey, it was scooped up at the hatchery – having been one of the lucky ones to complete its journey to the end, skipping every hook and net along the way.”
The web page then goes on to explain where each and very ingredient in the Chinook salmon in a chardonnay reduction sauce came from.
Sometimes the web page even identified the vessel that caught the fish.
Batch code TCL0108 for the Albacore Tuna in Thai Coconut Lemongrass notes that the albacore tuna in that pouch was caught by one of two fishing vessels, either the F/V Valor III, captained by Dan Glissendorf, who docks the fish at Newport, Oregon, or the F/V Sundancer, a new business owned by two young brothers, Mike Quandt, a fisherman, and Tim Quandt, a refrigeration expert.
Duncan Berry, chief executive officer and co-founder of Fishpeople, was raised in Portland and on the coast at Gearhart, Oregon, and developed an early love of seafood while working as a salmon fisherman in the Pacific Ocean.
More information about Duncan and other employees, and their products is on the website, at www.fishpeopleseafood.com.