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On the dark morning of a sub-freezing day just outside Sitka, Alaska, Evan O’Brien donned his wetsuit, swam through the 40°F water, hiked to the far side of a rocky causeway, and scraped off patches of gooseneck barnacles with a metal tool. He only nearly got swept away by big waves a few times before trekking home and sending his catch to Wildfish Cannery, a 35-year-old seafood processor an hour by plane away on Prince of Wales Island.
This spring, along with the barnacles known in Spain as a delicacy called percebes, Wildfish plans to release cans of brined pink ‘singing’ scallops and release a new style of canned rockfish. It is the only company in the country to sell any of these products, which it does thanks to a former restaurant chef and third-generation cannery owner.
Spending his childhood summers working for the family business prepared Mathew Scaletta well for the intensity of the professional kitchen. “The restaurant world is tough, but compared to seafood processing, it’s nothing.” Both industries shared similar skills and punishing 100-hour work weeks, he found when he left tiny Klawock, Alaska. But after a decade of casual and fine-dining cooking in Portland and Chicago restaurants, he returned to where he started and began slowly bringing his chef instincts to the traditional industry.
Photo courtesy of Wildfish
Today, Wildfish sells smoked geoduck, octopus, and buttery tender white king salmon, along with a slate of standard salmon offerings. But the bulk of their business still comes from the same thing Scaletta’s grandmother, Phyllis Meuller, did when she opened Wildfish in 1987: smoking salmon for the local community.
A bookkeeper for the local school, Meuller had summers off and saw local fishermen needing someone to deal with their fish. She set up shop smoking fish for people in the community and for the personal catch of the fisherman on the big-business fishing boats. “Alaska has a big canning tradition,” Scaletta says, something the state takes pride in, which often surprises people from elsewhere. “But there’s a difference between the canned salmon we eat and what you buy at the grocery store.”
All summer, Scaletta’s grandmother and father canned the salmon that their community lived on through the rest of the year. So, in 2015, when they asked him if he wanted to move home, learn the business, and take it over, he said, “Absolutely, yes. I was sick of the grind.”
Mathew Scaletta, photo courtesy of Wildfish
Canning Creativity
It also gave him a chance to revive an idea that had first occurred to him seven years before, when he watched Anthony Bourdain highlight Spanish canned seafood on an episode of No Reservations, calling it some of the finest and most delicious seafood in the world. “My family has a salmon cannery,” he thought. “Why aren’t we doing this?”
When he got back to Klawock, he first got a crash course in running the business. “The food was easy, that’s what I knew.” Suddenly he also had to be an accountant, too, and so much else. “Being in this part of Alaska, you can’t just call a repairman, they could be days and thousands of dollars away,” he says. “You have to do everything yourself.” He learned, and fast – his grandmother passed away the following January, leaving him in charge.
At that point, the business was still seasonal, running alongside the salmon from May to early October. But Scaletta noticed divers coming in through the fall with broken geoduck – a hazard of picking the pricey giant clam – that they could barely give away. Wildfish started offering to smoke those for the divers, too, which extended the canning season.
He spent the off-seasons working on label redesigns and selling small batches of seafood to gift shops around the state. In 2019, he started working on e-commerce, studying how to set up Facebook ads and battle the algorithm for eyeballs. Though it still paled in comparison to the traditional custom processing and private label work they did, that year, for the first time, Wildfish could employ any staff who wanted to stay through the winter.
Geoduck, photo courtesy of Wildfish
Then Covid hit, the big brands pulled their Facebook ads, and Scaletta was perfectly poised to take advantage of the rock-bottom prices and spike in online shopping – Wildfish maxed out production with online sales. Scaletta describes their core e-commerce audience as “dudes who like to hunt and fish, but also care about the quality of their food,” a group that tends to stick to the classic salmon options.
But the internet opened up another, smaller audience, too: the food lovers and culinarily curious, the ones who order the barnacles, geoduck, and pink scallops. “New products let people know that Alaska seafood is more than just salmon,” says Jon Brodie, who does sales and marketing, among other things, for the company.
“We aren’t trying to reinvent or discover anything,” says Scaletta about their one-of-a-kind products. “I came in and saw all these parts and built off our own culture that was already there.” What they do, he says, is spotlight what has always existed and constantly look for new ways to do that.
Photo courtesy of Wildfish
Last year, they collaborated with chef Sara Hauman on a rockfish escabeche, and they hope to do more chef collaborations down the line (Hauman now has her own tinned fish company, Tiny Fish Co.). This year, Wildfish added the barnacles and scallops to their offerings, and will release another rockfish product – cured and canned in oil with sumac and dill. But for all the fun they have getting creative and appealing to the committed food lovers, the company never wavers on its deep Alaskan roots.
“The genesis of Wildfish is food security,” points out Brodie. “There’s a legacy to what Wildfish does.” It came from the symbiotic relationship between Scaletta’s grandmother and the local fishing community, the connection directly to the harvesters, like O’Brien, who dive into Alaska’s chilly waters to procure the seafood they sell. “That trust gave me the confidence to bring our products to a bigger audience,” says Scaletta. “This is not a trend for us, this is our lives.”
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