Jeff Sedacca, the former CEO of Sunnyvale Seafood, the U.S. sales arm of Zhangjiang, China-based shrimp and tilapia producer Guolian Aquatic, retired for a sum total of one day at the end of 2021.
Then, he took a call from Eugene Fernandez, representing the ownership group of Elverta, California, U.S.A.-based Sterling Caviar, which acquired the company from Stolt Sea Farm in November 2020, and agreed to help grow its caviar and sturgeon production and to expand its operations to include other finfish aquaculture production facilities.
Soon thereafter, he agreed to take on a more formal position with the company as CEO, he told SeafoodSource on 15 March at the 2022 Seafood Expo North America in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Sedacca said he will be running the day-to-day operations at Sterling while Eugene Fernandez handles the finances and fundraising.
“There’s things that can be improved but the aquaculture is good,” he said. “The company was basically running on autopilot, but with the new management, it has great potential.”
Sterling Caviar was established by Norwegian-based Stolt Sea Farm in 1988 to raise white sturgeon and caviar, but it has faced tough competition from cheaper Chinese caviar. But Sedacca said he’s confident that through the acquisition of other aquaculture operations a revamped approach to sales, the company can at least double its current size and go public. He says Sterling is in the process of acquiring two aquaculture farms in Northern California and, through those acquisitions and others, will soon expand into the production of tilapia, catfish, black bass, and striped bass. Sturgeon and caviar currently make up around Sterling Caviar’s 85 to 90 percent of its business currently, but that will drop to 70 percent as soon as the acquisitions are completed.
“There are a lot of small, independent, family-owned aquaculture companies around the United States. They're focused on farming and they really are not in a position to scale, but we can we can look at it as a roll-up situation. And that's what we're doing,” Sedacca said. “I think we would need to be in the USD 60 million to USD 70 million [EUR 54.4 million to EUR 63.5 million] range minimum before we could start about think about going public, and we’re probably around USD 30 million [EUR 27.2 million] now. Doubling our sales is not hard in this case, because there was not a lot of sales effort. We have the fish already in the water to be able to double [sales], and in terms of the other fish that are non-sturgeon, we can scale that up in under a year.”
Sedacca said Sterling Caviar is actively exploring other potential acquisitions in the U.S. and Canada, with a focus on aquaculture operations. The goal is to acquire more scale, diversity of offerings, and proximity to other U.S. markets. Additionally, Sedacca said Sterling is planning on stocking more fish and expanding its processing capacity. Sterling currently has 300,000 fish in its ponds, and its processing facility in Elverta ships out 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of sturgeon meat weekly. Sedacca also said Sterling will soon begin smoking its sturgeon meat.
“We have a lot of property in Elverta, so we can do a pretty big expansion right on site,” Sedacca said.
Previously, Sterling sold most of its fish on the live market to smokers and to foodservice, but Sedacca said positive seafood-buying trends that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic have changed what’s possible for the company.
“I've now looked at the numbers and I see that the demand for American products and traceable products and farm-to-table products is so high right now. The numbers work now where we can take that fish and process it and sell it to retailers and be competitive with a lot of the exporters that are doing the high-end tilapia, for example, out of South America,” he said. “That's amazing.”
Photo courtesy of Cliff White/SeafoodSource
