SeaShare’s effort to provide high quality portions of seafood to food banks nationwide has moved into high gear in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has left millions of Americans unemployed and struggling to put food on their tables.
The Seattle-based nonprofit, with a growing number of several hundred partners and donors, is able to turn every dollar donated into eight servings of seafood for those in need.
In early April E & E Foods donated 110,000 pounds of nutritious wild Alaska smelt to SeaShare, which helped coordinate the first delivery of 30,000 pounds, or 120,000 servings to the Food Bank of Alaska, with three more similarly sized donations scheduled to address the growing needs in communities hit economically by the COVID-19 virus.
Transportation logistics donated by PBX Trucking, D&B Transload and Tote Maritime Alaska made it possible to move that first 30,000 pounds from Puget Sound to Anchorage in early April and another load was scheduled to reach Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and other coastal communities.
Other recent shipments from SeaShare included 22 million servings of breaded portions of seafood to 16 food banks in 12 states and 500,000 servings of breaded seafood to four food banks in another three states, with the food banks themselves arranging shipment.
In Alaska 50,000 servings of salmon and halibut from Trident Seafoods in Kodiak were shipped to Bean’s Café in Anchorage, with freight costs donated by Matson.
SeaShare shipments to Alaska so far in 2020 have already reached over 100,000 pounds, including 7,000 pounds of salmon burgers to Dillingham, plus salmon steaks and pollock portions to the Juneau food bank and pollock portions and halibut and salmon steaks to the food bank in Anchorage.
In mid-March SeaShare sent over two million servings of family-sized packages of wild Alaska Pollock donated by wild Alaska Pollock Producers to 16 food banks in 12 states.
SeaShare dates back to 1994, when a small group of commercial fishermen in Alaska began donating fish caught incidentally to their directed harvest began donating their bycatch to food banks. To date more than 200 million servings of seafood have been distributed to food banks nationwide.
More information on SeaShare, including partners and donors and ways to donate, are online at www.seashare.org.