Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.A.-based Beaver Street Fisheries’ partnership with NASCAR’s Ty Dillon started organically.
“I really like Ty Dillon,” Beaver Street Fisheries Executive Vice President and co-owner Mark Frisch told SeafoodSource at the 2025 Seafood Expo North America in Boston, Massachussetts, U.S.A.
Beaver Street is a vertically integrated company which operates a wholesale business as well as subsidiaries Sea Best, a frozen fish retail brand, and Tropic Seafood, a Bahamian lobster producer, among others.
Like Frisch, whose family has owned Beaver Street for 70 years, Dillon is in the family business. His grandfather is NASCAR star Richard Childress, and his brother Austin Dillon drives for RCR in the NASCAR Cup Series.
A fan of the sport, Frisch heard through friends that Dillon was looking to sign a full time charter.
“I was like, let’s see what we can do,” he said of the collaboration.
After a less comprehensive partnership last year, Beaver Street has secured Dillon to drive the Sea Best car for 20 races this season.
Though the collaboration was begun through a personal connection between Frisch and Dillon, Frisch told SeafoodSource that “it’s a complete marketing strategy,” which works hand in hand with the company’s larger goals.
“There [is] crossover between the NASCAR fan and the seafood shopper,” Frisch explained.
The 800 million dollar (EUR 732 million) company is on a quest to make seafood accessible to the various consumers it serves, which range from individual shoppers to chefs and restaurants.
Seafood “can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be," Beaver Street Vice President of Marketing Candice Nagel said. "It can be an affordable, approachable protein option.”
“For decades the message we’ve been hearing from shoppers is, ‘I don’t know how to prepare [seafood], I don’t know much about it,’” Frisch said.
He believes he can help customers overcome their intimidation through partnerships with organizatoins they know and love – like NASCAR – and leveraging technology can help make their choices easier.
Frisch pointed out an innovative feature on the Sea Best website which helps consumers identify new species they might like based on their current favorites. Called the Sea Best Fish Finder, the feature can recommend both species and recipe options based on user inputs, including the kinds of fish they know they like and how they like their fish prepared.
“Shrimp and salmon are the heroes of the category,” Frisch said, but features like the Fish Finder can help broaden consumers’ relationships with seafood and the Beaver Street brands.
Nagel said that the company was focused on “making [seafood] easy and making it delicious.”
“We want to make navigating the seafood category less intimidating, we want to make cooking less intimidating,” she added.
In early 2024, Captain Fresh, the rapidly-growing technology-enabled seafood marketplace platform, appeared poised to acquire Beaver Street Fisheries. The deal never materialized, however, and at SENA 2025, Frisch told SeafoodSource that the company is now leveraging technology on its own terms in order to grow its presence and continue innovating.
“The biggest thing I want people to know is we are making big investments into data and technology to be able to make really fast, reliable, executable, scientifically-driven decisions for our customers, to help guide them in the right direction, so they can then make the best decisions for their menu or their counter or shelf," Frisch said.
Frisch explained that he wanted to provide lasting value to his customers, and was uninterested in short-term transactional efforts. Building out Beaver Streets' technology team is a long-term, but crucial, effort.
