A global seafood food aid program based in Alaska, which benefits millions of hungry people while helping the seafood industry move its harvest to market, had a banner year in 2024, with sales exceeding $1.07 billion, at a cost of under $6 million.
“That’s a pretty good return on the state’s investment,” said Bruce Schactler, director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute’s (ASMI) Alaska Global Food Aid program, in a presentation on Dec. 3 to ASMI’s All Hands on Deck annual gathering at the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage.
In the first six months of 2024 the program saw $100 million in sales of canned salmon, Schactler added.
“It stabilized the canned salmon market,” he said.
The Alaska Global Food Air Program is a partnership of the state of Alaska and its fishing industry to expand the seafood market and develop new customers for the state’s seafood products. The program achieves this through federal food and nutrition programs that reach millions of food aid consumers nationwide and around the world. The network includes 15 federal nutrition assistance programs – their focus being the use of the combined efforts of the industry and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide high quality marine-sourced nutrition to all program recipients.
“One in four Americans are affected by these programs,” Schactler said. “We are pretty happy to be able to do this.”
Schactler and his colleague Nina Schlolssman work consistently with groups ranging from Congress and the State Department to International Relief and Development, Save the Children, World Vision, the U.S. Agency for International development, and others to get Alaska seafood.
“We never know who we are going to be working with, but we know who we are working for, and that’s you guys,” Schactler said.
The COVID-19 pandemic put a huge pressure on people worldwide who were already food insecure, while the demand for improved nutrition called for more healthy seafood.
One of the goals of the United Nations’ global Sustainable Development program is to end hunger and ensure access by all people – particularly those in vulnerable situations, including infants – to sufficient amounts of nutritious food by 2030.
Alaska Global Food Aid has worked with several entities to create recipes incorporating Alaska seafood into foods familiar to different cultural groups. Offerings have expanded over the years – from canned salmon to fillets of wild sockeye salmon and Alaska pollock to a variety of frozen portions, including wild Alaska pollock fish sticks and nuggets.
As noted on the program’s website, shelf stable Alaska seafood products are also ideal for use in emergency and chronic food programs both domestically and overseas.
In recent years there has been an increase in consumer ready forms of seafood in food aid programs to meet growing needs and to supply food when there are major disruptions.
Schactler said ASMI is continuing to work on new product forms for this program.
The print version of this story misspelled Nina Schlolssman’s last name.
