Pacific Cloud Seafoods: From Kodiak Docks to Kitchen Table

The Cannery Problem

Before Pacific Cloud Seafoods existed, I fished in Kodiak and sold my catch to large corporate-owned canneries. The transaction was simple and lopsided: you caught the fish, you delivered it to the dock, and you took whatever price they offered. The quality of your handling, the selectivity of your gear, the care you put into bleeding and icing — none of it mattered to the price sheet. A jig-caught king salmon treated like a piece of art got the same rate as a net-caught fish that sat in a hold for two days.

That arrangement works if you are a high-volume operation that can make up margins on sheer throughput. It does not work if you are a small-boat fisherman who believes the product deserves better and the consumer should know the difference.

Kodiak, 2016

I started Pacific Cloud Seafoods in 2016 because I wanted to find out whether direct-marketing could change the equation. Instead of selling through the cannery pipeline, I had my catch custom processed by two Kodiak operations: Pickled Willies and Kodiak's Wild Source Seafood, which is owned by the Suna'q tribe. They had the processing capacity. I had the fish and the conviction that consumers in the Lower 48 would pay a fair price for a properly handled, fully traceable product if someone gave them the option.

During this period I was also a board member of the Alaska Jig Association, which advocates for small-boat jig fishermen — the gear group with the lowest bycatch and the highest quality product that consistently gets the worst dock prices. That board work led me to the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, where the advocacy expanded beyond gear politics into broader questions about sustainable fisheries, community access, and supply chain transparency.

Sitka and the Bridge to New York

The AMCC connection brought me into partnership with Sitka Salmon Shares — now Sitka Seafood Market — who were building a community-supported fisheries model at national scale. In 2018, they hired me for a dual role: Kodiak Fleet Manager on the Alaska side, and Western New York Farmers Markets Coordinator on the consumer side.

I moved back to Western New York and kept fishing in Alaska seasonally. The farmers market work was an education in what consumers actually want. They want to look you in the eye. They want to hear how the fish was caught. They want to know the fisherman's name. The premium they pay is not for the product alone — it is for the relationship and the transparency that commodity seafood cannot offer.

That understanding shaped everything Pacific Cloud would become.

The Pandemic Changed Everything

When the pandemic hit, Sitka pulled out of farmers markets. The economics of in-person sales collapsed overnight for every DTC seafood operation that depended on face-to-face interaction. But the demand was still there. People stuck at home wanted good food, and the grocery supply chain was showing its weaknesses in real time — empty shelves, inconsistent quality, no traceability whatsoever.

I could not let the mission die because the distribution channel changed. So I launched Pacific Cloud Seafoods as a Western New York operation, set up at kitchens on Chandler Street, and started building a direct-to-consumer channel from scratch. Wild Alaskan seafood from Kodiak to Buffalo — no middlemen, no commodity pipeline, no mystery sourcing.

For four years, Chandler Street was home base. We processed orders, managed cold storage, coordinated shipments, handled customer relationships, ran the books, dealt with compliance, fixed equipment, and answered every email ourselves. Anyone who has run a small food business knows what that list actually means: it means doing everything, all the time, with no margin for error and thin margins everywhere else.

FreshFix and Closing a Chapter

In 2024, we tried an experimental partnership with FreshFix.com to expand our reach through their meal kit and grocery delivery infrastructure. The idea was sound — leverage an existing platform to reach customers who would never find us at a farmers market or through word of mouth.

The partnership ended, and with it, I made the decision to close Pacific Cloud Seafoods to fish sales. After years of running a small DTC seafood operation, the honest assessment was that the business model demands a level of capitalization and logistical scale that a one-person operation cannot sustain indefinitely. The margins are real but thin. The labor is constant. And the tools available to small operators — for inventory, cost tracking, compliance, customer management — were either built for enterprises or did not exist.

The Thread That Never Broke

Closing fish sales was not the end of the mission. It was a pivot in how I pursue it.

The years running Pacific Cloud taught me exactly where small food businesses break down: opaque costs, manual bookkeeping, compliance paperwork that eats productive hours, and software that was never designed for someone standing in a 34-degree cooler with fish on their hands. Those problems are solvable. They just need tools built by someone who has actually lived them.

That is what I build now. The Fish Cost Calculator gives seafood operators real yield-based cost analysis instead of back-of-napkin estimates. HACCP Helper puts voice-enabled inventory management in the processing room where it belongs. The Seafood Manager platform handles the business side — orders, customers, inventory — in a way that makes sense for a ten-person operation, not a ten-thousand-person corporation.

My work with Recipe Route through Orbitist pushes this further. Recipe Route is not just a delivery platform — it is part of a holistic approach to the problems in the food system, using new advances in ag-tech and AI to connect producers, home cooks, and local ingredients in ways that were not possible five years ago.

The connecting thread across all of it — from Kodiak docks to Chandler Street kitchens to the code I write now — is the same conviction that started Pacific Cloud: small operators deserve better tools, consumers deserve transparency, and the systems that connect them should work for both sides. The delivery mechanism changed. The mission did not.