Wednesday this week was the Annual Ocean Beauty/Sea Share Golf Tournament hosted by Ocean Beauty Seafood at Maplewood Golf Course.
Each year this tournament raises funds to help Sea Share provide seafood meals to families and communities in need. Ocean Beauty themselves have surpassed 10,000,000 meals contributed during their sponsorship history.
SeaShare, a non-profit organization that was created to help the seafood industry donate to hunger-relief efforts in the United States, has set a goal to donate 800,000 servings of seafood across Alaska this year. And the organization is well on their way. The group announced in an update that they just sent 96,000 servings of halibut to Nome and Kotzebue thanks to transportation provided by the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak. The donation was part of an annual contribution from Ocean Beauty Seafoods. Since 2013 the company has donated over 73,000 pounds to Kotzebue, and an additional 45,000 to Nome. In addition to the generous contribution from Ocean Beauty Seafoods, SeaShare was also able to send 18,000 pounds of salmon, halibut and lingcod to the Kenai Food Bank this week thanks to a donation from Trident Seafoods. So far this year SeaShare has been able to send a total of 640,000 servings of seafood from Alaska, to Alaska, thanks to a number of donations, including North Pacific Seafoods, who provides halibut and salmon on a regular basis. Only 160,000 more servings to go to meet the goal for 2019!
Scott Hammon is the Operations Director of SeaShare and can be reached at jharmon@seashare.org . While in the Pacific Northwest we are very familiar with SeaShare, they are not exclusive to us in their need for donations and support from seafood companies around the country.
Also, a very pleasant surprise for me, was to meet Dr. Harald Guimaraes from Findus/Nomad Foods. For a couple months I have been working with Michaela Eklund with Kuehne and Nagel Sweden to begin inbound air freight shipments for Ocean Beauty and Findus. Our first order is arriving in Seattle next week. Findus and Ocean Beauty have signed a national distribution agreement to bring frozen, European style value added products into the US and Ocean Beauty will be having us handle any air freight moves.
Just this month we have also had a very successful frozen air inbound routing from Icicle Seafood from Bremerhaven, which we also worked through Kuehne and Nagel.
Sometime these relationships take a little time to start rolling but these are two very large local seafood companies that are now coming to us and Kuehne and Nagel to help solve their perishable international air freight needs. It is very nice to see our synergy starting to get some traction.
