Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.A.-based Bay Hill Seafood Sales is planning to launch its first line of retail products after over a decade of serving wholesale customers.
Bay Hill Seafood Sales President and CEO Justin Conrad told SeafoodSource during the 2026 Global Seafood Market Conference, which took place 18 to 22 January in Hollywood, Florida, U.S.A., that the company is currently working to complete a full line of products that can be featured in retail stores.
“We’ve been overwhelmingly a foodservice company for years,” Conrad said. “We have had some retail partners reach out to us and take our Sailor Supreme brand and put it in a retail line, so we’re in the process of that.”
Conrad said the company has been developing the products and has “roughly eight of the 10” finished and ready for retail shelves but is waiting to finalize the full line before launching.
“We’ll look at launching that in late Q2, early Q3,” he said.
Conrad said a retail sales line is significantly different than the wholesale ones it has operated for years and takes careful design work and planning to creatre effective layouts and logos for packaging.
“You have to get the right product mix because the customer doesn’t want 30 SKUs; they want 10,” Conrad said.
Timing is also a new challenge the company has to grapple with, including for steps in the process like printing the packaging and getting all the retail bags ready.
“It’s not easy to have everything ready where you can say, ‘OK, we’re ready for a hard launch on 1 June,” Conrad said.
He said outside its new retail sales plans, Bay Hill had a solid year in 2025, despite the many trade challenges that the seafood industry is grappling with.
“Because of things with tariffs, we started tracking our sales less with dollars than we do with pounds, so now we can compare how were doing year over year,” Conrad said. “We were 8.5 percent up over last year, and I think that’s pretty solid, which as an established company like that to be up 8.5 percent is not easy to do.”
He added that the growth was entirely organic, as Bay Hill Seafood Sales didn’t branch into any new species during the year.
“We’re getting better market penetration,” Conrad said.
Looking forward into 2026, Conrad said there will definitely be some challenges sourcing certain raw materials. Major cuts to cod quotas will be difficult to rectify.
“That’s a hard one to replace because it’s such a traditional staple in many parts of the country. That’s a challenge, and I think that’s going to continue to be a challenge,” he said.
Despite the challenges, Conrad said he’s still optimistic about the coming year.
“It’s an interesting time, but I’m bullish on 2026,” he said.
