Fathom Seafood CEO Cody Mills got his start in the seafood industry trading geoduck he sourced from a friend out of the back of a Honda Element.
Now, his company is poised to begin construction on a USD 280 million (EUR 257 million), 550,000-square-foot seafood facility in Tacoma, Washington, U.S.A., that promises to be one of the most advanced of its kind in the world.
Mills told SeafoodSource that until recently, Fathom Seafood has been entirely self-funded, but that changed with its push to build the new facility. The company is about to wrap up a funding round that will help build the processing facility, and Fathom has a strategic programmatic development partner that will help the company build multiple facilities.
“They actually agreed to put up all of the money for this facility,” Mills said.
As it prepares to start building, Fathom has also garnered multiple offers from companies willing to partner on the operating side of the business and is currently evaluating those to make sure it secures the right partner once things are up and running.
Mills said the Port of Tacoma is also on board with the construction, and the new facility will be built on a brownfield site which will transform blighted land into an economic engine for the area.
“We’re going to provide hundreds of jobs in the Port of Tacoma, and we’re going to be doing automated processing with robots, as well as adding robotics. To be able to do all that at this 550,000-square-foot facility, we brought in Domenic Prinzivalli,” Mills said.
Prinzivalli is the former global head of operation services at Amazon and an expert in leveraging automation, robotics, and software for optimizing supply chains and boosting efficiency. In his role with Amazon, he was responsible for non-corporate real estate at the company and helped roll out the supply chain that the company uses in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Amazon’s model, where it transitioned from a provider of its own goods to a logistics hub selling outside products, is similar to what Mills said he wants to accomplish with Fathom Seafoods’ new facility.
“What we’re doing here today is transitioning from 95 percent our products to hopefully 95 percent everybody else’s products,” Mills said. “This is a third-party processing facility with third-party logistics on site – so everything in one place with a third-party waste capture stream on site.”
The processing facility will be capable of ...
