A Seattle-based seafood company says it won't operate its Petersburg salmon cannery this summer.
Ocean Beauty Seafoods will move about 200 summer workers from its Petersburg cannery to other locations, as the company focuses more on freezing fish. The reason for the change is a combination of low pink salmon returns last year and shifting demand.
The development was first reported by Petersburg public radio station KFSK.
"Because last year's pink salmon harvest was so poor, there's not a lot of inventory," said Tom Sunderland, vice president of marketing at Ocean Beauty. "Particularly frozen product. … If you go back to 2015, if was such a huge year for canning, there's still some inventory out there over the past two years."
Ocean Beauty will focus on freezing salmon this summer because it will likely net a higher return than canning, Sunderland said, though the company will continue canning at its other sites.
The bulk of the seasonal workers who would usually be at the Petersburg site will head instead to the company's Excursion Inlet facility near Juneau, Sunderland said.
"It's a much bigger and more versatile facility," he said. "It's freezing, caviar production, all kinds of things there as well as a cannery."
Workers who don't end up at Excursion Inlet will go to other Ocean Beauty sites in Alaska, Sunderland said — the company also has facilities in Cordova, Kodiak and Naknek.
The Petersburg facility will stay open for office uses, and a floating processor will add to Ocean Beauty's freezing capacity there, "but the actual production floor will be mothballed this year," Sunderland said.
Pink salmon fisheries in the Gulf of Alaska had such low returns last summer that they earned a disaster declaration from the federal government.