In early November, Randy Rhodes left Harvest Select Catfish and Seafood, after serving as president of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama U.S.A.-based firm for more than 15 years. Prior to moving to Harvest Select Catfish & Seafood, he worked at Southern Pride Catfish. He can be reached at (334) 507-8153 or at [email protected].
SeafoodSource: What were the reasons for your departure from Harvest Select?
Rhodes: It had been planned for me to step aside and pass the leadership torch to Chris Barnett. That got accelerated a little bit because it just felt like now was the right timing. I have a knee surgery scheduled next week and I’m going to have to recuperate. So this will take me away and give me time to reflect. It has certainly been an amazing ride in the catfish industry.
SeafoodSource: What are your thoughts about your tenure at Harvest Select?
Rhodes: I’ve been a part of the catfish industry since I was 23, so 40 years. I had a wonderful start to my career at Farm Fresh Catfish, then with the startup Southern Pride Catfish and American Pride. And then I came to over Harvest Select and I think we built a great team and built the brand and brought it up to where we were very proud of it now. I’m still very proud of it.
SeafoodSource: Do you have a next move planned?
Rhodes: We’ll see what happens. I'm absolutely healthy, other than a bad knee. I still have a few more years I want to be a participant in something, and I've got a number of ideas. I'm willing to listen to what people might come up with. I enjoy traveling a lot and I’ve got a lot of connections that can help me contribute to being a part of a seafood business. From time to time around the industry, someone leaves a company they’ve been at for a long time and it’s kind of a surprise, and then all of a sudden they pop back up somewhere else. So you never know. I’m definitely looking for a new adventure, some new opportunity. I’d love to be able to give back some of the things that I've learned in the business either on a consulting basis or with someone in a semi-retirement fashion.
SeafoodSource: What is the state of the U.S. catfish industry currently?
Rhodes: The industry has ratcheted down over the last 20 years. There are very strong farmers and processors in the business still, but the volume is lower than it was 20 years ago. We’ve just got to rethink and retrain ourselves to the new generation of catfish eaters and understand what their needs are. There are strong opportunities for the industry, although right now with feed prices and various issues and Covid issues, we've all had our challenges, but it now looks like everybody's picked up and is moving right along.
SeafoodSource: Have low-priced pangasius imports hurt the industry as much as some in the industry and various elected officials have claimed?
Rhodes: Yes, but there's a number of different kinds of imported fish that have hurt the catfish industry, not just pangasius. And that’s definitely been an issue hurting prices. We have a very good product here in the United States grown under the regulations of the U.S. government and, of course, USDA inspection. And we're all third-party audited, which gives us more credibility. So it's a good industry that is following the rules that have been established and we’re standing strong. Obviously, I'd love to see the industry grow and to see the U.S. aquaculture industry grow.
SeafoodSource: How would you describe the state of the seafood industry in general?
Rhodes: I just recently attended the Groundfish Forum and the GSA event in Canada, and the consensus is that times are tough. It seems like the challenges of Covid have just rolled into the challenges of inflation and now the challenges of the last year and half, with lower consumption and higher interest rates. It's hard to explain right now where the customers are, where the people have gone who eat our products.
SeafoodSource: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the short-term future of the seafood industry?
Rhodes: I think it’s unanimous across the industry that it has been a challenge for everybody, both in aquaculture and wild fisheries, over the past year. But that said, I think next year there's opportunities for sure. We’ve got to catch back up and move forward again. It'll happen, it's just a fight that we have to go through right now.
Photo by Chris Chase/SeafoodSource
