William G. Dawson President, Seafood Suppliers Inc.
Published: August, 2003
I own Seafood Suppliers along with my wife Signa. It’s a mom-and-pop deal. We’re referred to as a "first receiver, wholesale-to-wholesale" maritime seafood company. We don’t have trucks that go to restaurants or grocery stores. We sell to the people who do.
We offload fish, but that isn’t the only thing that we do. We also promote local fisheries, such as the California Salmon Fishery, which we’ve been very involved with for years, as well as other species of local fish, halibut and other groundfish like black cod, channel rock, sand dab, and petrale.
Most of the boats that fish for us, are independent operators that deliver to us during salmon season at Pier 33. They follow the fish during the season, which usually runs from May through September. And we also will follow those boats as they’re catching fish, so we may have to unload them at Bodega Bay or Fort Bragg or Monterey.
Weather, of course, is always a big factor, and this year it’s been a really big factor. We’ve had a lot of wind this year.
On an average day, we’ll coordinate with about 14 or 15 boats, usually by cell phone. Sometimes we’re selling fish that are actually still on the boat miles offshore.
Probably 80 percent of the salmon that we land in San Francisco is sold outside of San Francisco through air freight. We ship fish into every every major metropolitan market in the United States.
Wild salmon has become quite the buzz. We believe that the California king salmon are the best in the world. Wild salmon as opposed to farm-raised salmon are really growing in popularity.
We have a very sustainable fishery here in California. In fact, the California Salmon Council, which is backed by the Department of Agriculture here in California, is working right now to get labeling and certification. The California salmon fishery is even endorsed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium folks, as well as the Audubon Society.
The majority of the men and women that fish salmon in California are not new to it. The average age, someone told me recently, was 59 years for a salmon boat captain. Their sons and daughters aren’t following them into the fishery. There’s been a reduction in the size of our fleets over the years. It used to be very traditional, handed down from father to son or daughter. Unfortunately, now you won’t find too many young people in this business
The heart of the seafood industry has always been in our fish wharf. Actors can scratch a living off Broadway; but we can’t; only Broadway works for us. We’re on Fish Broadway here. The exchange of product, the trucking, by air, coming in and going out, it all happens in our fish wharf. I could lower the cost of doing business by doing it in Fairfield in a warehouse, and that’d be wonderful, because the cost of doing business in San Francisco right now is atrocious. But I wouldn’t be able to do what we do, make a living on the ocean.
