Tom Sunderland has joined Silver Bay Seafoods as its chief sales officer.
The former longtime employee of Ocean Beauty Seafoods, including stints as vice president of marketing and communications and director of marketing, started in his new role 1 December, he told SeafoodSource. He will remain based in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.
“I’ll be joining the team at Silver Bay to work with [Managing Partner] Rich [Riggs] and [President and CEO] Cora [Campbell] and grow the business that they’ve built,” Sunderland said. “It was a great opportunity and I will just try to build on what they’ve created.”
Sunderland left Ocean Beauty in June 2018 and started his own consulting firm, 15th and Pearl Consulting, working with the seafood and consumer packaged goods sectors. But he wound down the business after he was hired full-time by Seattle-based company Trident Seafoods in July 2019, where he worked as salmon category manager.
Sunderland said he’s excited to continue to be involved with the Alaska salmon industry.
“The opportunities for all forms of Alaska salmon, all species and all forms, are really strong,” he said.
While numerous scientific and business experts have expressed concerns about lower salmon runs, blamed in part on warming waters due to climate change, Sunderland said he remains optimistic about the fishery’s future.
“We have to be aware and concerned about those issues, but Alaska’s three biggest salmon harvest years were 2013, 2015, and 2017, so it is the best-managed fishery in the world,” he said. “As these issues arise, we’ll be very aware of them, and we’ll take a very active approach towards them.”
Seattle-based Silver Bay Seafoods has become a major player in the Alaska salmon sector, and OBI Seafoods CEO Mark Palmer cited Silver Bay’s success as a reason for the merger of the Alaska operations of Ocean Beauty Seafoods and Icicle Seafoods in June. Larsen Mettler, who served as Silver Bay Seafoods’ chief financial officer from 2016 until August 2020, told SeafoodSource the company has a long-term commitment to automation and maximizing plant efficiency likely saved the company millions of dollars this year in saved expenses on COVID-19 compliance.
“Silver Bay greatly leveraged new potential of technology to achieve higher levels of automation, reducing labor costs by 50 percent versus competitors [pre-coronavirus],” Larsen Mettler, who served as Silver Bay Seafoods’ chief financial officer from 2016 until August 2020, told SeafoodSource. He added that a commitment to fair pay for fishermen and significant reinvestment into technology had given the company an edge in the hypercompetitive Alaska seafood processing scene.
“The technology we introduced brought the industry up as a whole, and did force competitors to step up and at least pay fisherman more on margins,” Mettler said. “It came from looking at areas where technology could be applied and specifically by looking at our big costs and pain points taking a hard look at how we could improve. “
Investments in high-quality tunnel freezing technology and higher-efficiency cutting machines helped position Silver Bay well for the extreme lurches the seafood market has undergone since the coronavirus reached pandemic-level, Mettler said.
“This enabled us to create new product forms and be much faster than our competitors,” he said. “Our competitors were using 75 to 80 percent of their fish, while Silver Bay was using 90 to 95 percent. That helped us find and create new markets, both for traditional product, but even more so for products like oil and feed.”
Photo courtesy of Tom Sunderland
