Kaare Ness, who co-founded Trident Seafoods in Alaska in 1973 and helped grow it into one of the largest seafood companies in the United States, died 23 January. He was 87.
Ness began fishing as a young man in his native Norway, but moved to the United States to fish the scallop grounds off New Bedford, Mass. Soon after, he moved to Alaska, where he became a highline crab skipper in the Aleutian chain. Along with fellow crab fishermen Chuck Bundrant and Mike Jacobson, Ness built the Billikin, a fishing vessel outfitted with crab cookers and freezing equipment, founding what eventually became one of North America’s largest vertically integrated seafood harvesting and processing companies.
Today, Trident Seafoods produces frozen, canned, smoked and ready-to-eat seafood products, from breaded whitefish for fast-food chains to salmon for supermarket sales and halibut for fine-dining establishments. Trident Seafoods annually processes more than 250 million pounds of finished seafood products and employs around 4,000 people, according to the company’s website.
According to a Trident press release, Ness was eager to share his knowledge and success with his family, partners and community. In 2012, he was knighted by King Harald of Norway and received the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for “fostering Norwegian-American relations and spearheading the creation of a memorial honoring more than 100 fishermen from Karmoy who had been lost at sea.”
His son, Arne Ness, said that a celebration of Kaare’s life will be scheduled this spring and asked that in lieu of flowers, donations in Kaare’s name be made to the Seattle Fishermen’s Memorial or to the Nordic Heritage Museum.
