Tom Zaffiro, the CEO of Braintree, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based seafood-processing company Channel Fish, is largely unshaken by the uncertainty currently facing the U.S. seafood industry.
Uncertainty, Zaffiro told SeafoodSource at the 2025 Seafood Expo North America, held 15 to 18 March in Boston, Massachusetts, is part of any lasting business’s story.
“The company has been around since 1946, and before I was born, we faced a lot of turmoil,” he said. “The first [instance of] turmoil I can remember [my dad] talking about was [when] my grandfather’s brother bought fishing boats in Boston, and he almost bankrupted the company. He didn’t have a family member or an inside person on the boats, and a lot of fish was stolen to the point where we had to sell the boats after about two years.”
Challenges came for the next generation, too, Zaffiro said.
Two of the biggest hurdles the company has ever faced came during his father’s tenure as CEO: the loss of 200 miles of fishing grounds to Canada in the 1970s and the collapse of the Northeast Atlantic’s cod fishery in the 1990s, which abruptly reduced fishing quotas.
“Traditionally, the company would get access to unlimited amounts of Atlantic cod and haddock landings, [but after the fishery collapse], it went down to almost nothing, and that still is kind of the case today,” he said. “So, that forced us, even going back to the ‘90s, to try to diversify the business and the products we sell.”
That diversification ...
