Fable Fish Co-Founder Meghan Luck was inspired to produce her award-winning salmon jerky while working in the Alaskan wholesale business.
“We saw literally hundreds of tons of really beautiful, filleted fish go and be used as byproduct and sold as a commodity," Luck told SeafoodSource at Seafood Expo North America, held March 15 to 18 in Boston, Massachusetts. "[This fish is] underutilized and undervalued in the supply chain because it doesn’t fit a really specific specification for a portion program or for a different wholesale program.”
Luck is a third generation Alaska fisher who grew up eating what the land produced. She ate wild game that her parents hunted, foraged for berries and mushrooms, and enjoyed smoked sockeye salmon, caught by her father, as her favorite snack.
“That was all really normal for me, and I didn't realize how unique it was," Luck said. "A big part of why I love Fable Fish and why I’m so passionate about it is is that I know how special it is to eat that way, and I know how satisfying it is – in small ways – to give people that gift.”
She said she wanted to give consumers access to wild Alaskan sockeye in a way that would be accessible for their budgets and familiar to their diets and lifestyles.
“Everybody knows what jerky is,” she said.
Fable Fish was also a product of Luck’s observation of the healthy snack food market.
“Protein is a huge priority for people’s diets right now. I like to believe that [Fable Fish salmon jerky is] really well aligned in a space that allows people to take that product and immediately recognize it and also recognize how special it is," Luck said.
Many consumers looking for high protein snacks will be used to seeing innovative products which add protein to other substances to increase performance, such as protein water, or caffeinated, protein-packed energy drinks.
Fable Fish, she said, wasn’t looking for a “unique niche.”
“It’s really cool to just have a product that is what it is. People resonate with that. A lot of times with our snacks, there’s not a lot of food left in our food," Luck said.
Unlike other high-protein, shelf-stable snacks, she said, Fable Fish jerky is a whole – and largely unadorned – food. Fable Fish is also unlike most salmon jerkies in that it is cut from long strips of whole muscle fish with the skin left on.
“The raw material itself is sockeye salmon from Bristol Bay, [and it is] such a pure, nutrient dense, beautiful fish, that if you just do as little as possible to it, and essentially smoke it in a way that my family has smoked fish in our backyard our whole lives … that’s all you have to do with this product. We want to keep it as simple as possible. That’s intentional," she said.
Luck sources her fish …
