Bristol Bay sockeye season plagued with uncertainty over pricing, supply glut

Uncertainty continues to cloud the 2023 sockeye salmon season in Bristol Bay, Alaska, U.S.A., as the fishery heads toward what has historically been its peak period.

Fishing in one of the world's most-productive sockeye salmon fishing grounds began on 1 June, but fishers are frustrated that processors have yet to disclose the price they intend to pay for this year’s catch.

Preliminary market prices released so far aren’t promising. So far, only Trident Seafoods has disclosed details, offering a base price of USD 0.60 (EUR 0.55) per pound for False Pass sockeye. This sharply contrasts to last year, when fishermen netted a base price of USD 1.15 (EUR 1.06) per pound for their catch. 

“Fishermen are not optimistic about this year's price,” Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association (BBRSDA) Executive Director Andy Wink told SeafoodSource. “It looks like it's going to be a situation where harvest volume and price will probably be way down from last year.”

Wink said the biggest factor pushing down prices is a glut in frozen headed and gutted (H&G) sockeye caused by last year's record catch of 60.1 million sockeye salmon – topping the previous record of 44.3 million sockeye set in 1995.

“Last year around this time, we were kind of around the USD 4.50 [EUR 4.13], maybe even up to USD 5.00 [EUR 4.59], range for frozen H&G if you could find it,” he said. “Now, things are probably [trending] in the USD 3.00 to USD 3.25 [EUR 2.76 to EUR 2.98] range, so it’s a pretty big difference.”

This year’s catch is still projected to be among the five strongest in the last 20 years and 40 percent greater than the average annual run recorded since 1963, but it's not clear where all the fish will go, consdering significant amounts of last year's catch is still in cold storage.

Two major processors contacted by SeafoodSource wouldn’t comment on sockeye inventory levels and how much remains of last year’s catch, and Wink said he has heard of several processors having moved through last year’s supply, but product from 2022 is continuing to flood the market, according to the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute Food Aid Director Brian Schactler.

“Well, I don't think it's any secret to anybody,” he told KDLG. “All you have to do is look at the size of the harvest, and what normally is sold around the world and realize it was a pretty overwhelming challenge for everybody to figure out what to do with so much product.”

Schatler said it is taking longer than anyone expected to sell through last year's catch.

“There's a big difference between a booming year and something that's double a booming year,” he said. “So I don't know that we've ever seen anything quite like this before, to where you harvest enough product, it'll take two years to sell it. So I think we're all on new territory here. And everybody from one end to the other is sort of just learning as we go almost on how to deal with something like this.”

That has given big retailers like Costco and Safeway more power to set prices, he said.

“The retailers ... are really the ones that are deciding what the stuff goes for,” he said. “They know what's going on in Bristol Bay. They can listen to your forecasts, they can go on [the website of Alaskas Department of] Fish and Game and look at the harvest figures of every single day. They know what's being harvested, and where, how much and can assume what the product forms are. So when you look at all of that, it has an effect on what this new product is going to be potentially sold for. And I think that's what we're seeing.”

Costco, Whole Foods, Albertson’s, Trader Joe’s, Kroger, and QFC all offered sockeye specials in the spring, before the Bristol Bay season started, and ASMI has put more money into a sockeye-focused marketing campaign. But the product glut, combined with the harm done by rising inflation, has resulted in a decline in overall demand for Alaska sockeye, according to Wink.

“Consumers are kind of feeling the pinch [with] higher prices; a lot of them are cutting back, so that affects everything, including sockeye. [It’s] definitely a challenging time to try to push more volume through the supply chain while also trying to maintain pricing," Wink said. “In reality, in order to move a larger volume of fish, product pricing probably did have to come down, and I think that that will help us move through the 2022 pack eventually and put us into a better sort of balance between demand and supply for the 2023 pack."

Some help is on the way in the form of federal purchasing for U.S. food assistance programs. In May, Alaska’s congressional delegation announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) intends to purchase USD 119.5 million (EUR 109 million) worth of Alaskan sockeye salmon and Pacific groundfish, which will help liquidate some of the remaining inventory.

In the meantime, Wink said many fishers are maintaining an outlook that recognizes the cyclical nature of Bristol Bay’s sockeye fishery.

“I'll acknowledge that I've talked to a fair number of fishermen who are looking at this as part of the cycle; things go down, [and] things go up,” he said. “There are definitely different opinions out there, but I'd say there's plenty of fishermen who see it both ways.”

Regardless, sockeye are now returning and the fishermen are out on the water catching them. On 4 July, nearly three million fish were caught across the bay, Alaska’s KDLG reported. The total number of fish caught to date has now reached 17.8 million, amounting to 35 percent of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s (ADFG) total forecasted run of 51 million sockeye. Escapement figures released by the ADFG show the Nushagak River alone has already met 63 percent of the upper limit of its annual escapement goal.

Photo courtesy of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association