Peter Pan Seafoods is riding an increase in online seafood commerce to ramp up the company’s online, never-frozen sales.
The ownership group of Rodger May of Northwest Fish, the Na’-Nuk Investment Fund, LP (managed by McKinley Alaska Private Investment LLC and McKinley Capital Management LLC), and the RRG Global Partners Fund (managed by RRG Capital Management, LLC) purchased the Bellevue, Washington, U.S.A. company from Maruha Nichiro in November 2020.
May, Peter Pan’s president, told SeafoodSource that the spike in online, fresh sales is in part due to the fact that consumers have been cooped up during the COVID-19 pandemic. But he said another factor was younger, tech-savvy consumers who want to know where their fish is coming from.
“As a consumer, you want a story, you want to understand the A to Z. It’s something that the pandemic helped bring on, that the millennials helped bring on. People want to know if this is the freshest out there, if it’s the best out there. They want to learn the nuances of it,” May told SeafoodSource.
May said the company’s renewed focus on never-frozen online sales lined up nicely this summer for Peter Pan, in particular for sockeye salmon out of Bristol Bay, Alaska. High demand for sockeye combined with strong supply as Bristol Bay registered its largest run since recording started in 1893.
May said Peter Pan flew a “record number” of fresh fish out of Bristol Bay, chartering around 60 flights to move approximately two million pounds of fresh sockeye out of its Bristol Bay plant. That fish was pre-sold online and then distributed through major retail partners, a system May said takes much of the guesswork out of fresh sales, making it far less risky than it once was.
“The nice part about online is that it actually takes some of the risks away. If a customer orders 10 pounds, you know exactly what that customer wanted and you’re producing to that order. At a retail outlet, they’re guessing what customers are going to eat Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. If they guess wrong, the fish they got on Monday still might be around on Friday,” May said.
May, who started at Peter Pan the beginning of this year, sees this season as the beginning of a ramp-up of fresh sales via e-commerce.
“It’s a segment that we’re going to continue to get better at. We’re going have better awareness of the customer groups and we’re going to be working social media to make our customers more aware. It’s a place we see very good growth potential,” May told SeafoodSource.
Moving forward, May said Peter Pan hopes to take a deep, unprecedented dive into fresh sales to restaurants.
“We’re going to attempt to do something no one has ever done before and reach out to restaurants that would love to take, say, a 50-pound minimum once a week. We would take that fish right from a fishing boat in Valdez, put it on UPS, and have it to them in a place like Kansas City 24 to 48 hours after it was unloaded from a boat in Alaska,” May said.
May said the story here will play a big part. He said a halibut fillet, for example, will arrive with documentation on when it was caught and by which boat, as well as a detailed travel itinerary of the fish.
Photo courtesy of Peter Pan Seafoods
