Sitka
Southeast Regions
Silver Bay Seafood is an integrated processor of frozen, salmon, herring and squid products for domestic and export markets. We began in 2007 as a single salmon processing facility in Sitka, Alaska. Today, Silver Bay is one of the largest seafood companies in Alaska, operating six domestic processing facilities throughout Alaska and the West Coast.
Silver Bay's primary strength is in its combination of having state of the art processing plants and favorable logistics to support its operations; competent management and key personnel; an established fish buying system; and ownership by fishermen who represent over 80% of the committed fishing effort.
Build a world class seafood company.
Through sound management, innovation, and teamwork, we provide our fishermen owners, and employees the "Silver Bay Experience" which is unparalleled service and an exceptional work environment while promoting company profitability.
Silver Bay's interests in Sitka are located at the Sawmill Cove Industrial Park, the site of the former APC pulp mill. Going into its eighth year of operation, Silver Bay has become the anchor business at the industrial park by investing more capital dollars into the site than any former tenant. This multi-million dollar capital investment alone has created family wage jobs through employment with Silver Bay directly, and with the exclusively-local contracting pool.
Additionally, it has been an economic stimulus for local suppliers and vendors. Over the long term, Silver Bay's presence will be a positive economic impact to Sitka in the form of new jobs, growth in related business interests, property taxes and new raw fish tax revenue. Silver Bay's vision of being a cornerstone of the Sitka economy is consistent with the intent of the Industrial Park in recovering from the pulp mill closure in 1993.
Silver Bay initially leased 34,500 square feet of the pulp dock warehouse in 2007 and purchased the 187,252 SF property in 2008, including the 75,000 SF building where the processing is conducted. In early 2015, the company purchased the adjacent former waste water treatment plant with the intent to diversify its seafoods by-products line by manufacturing wild Alaska salmon oil.
In summer of 2015, SBS started operating one each of tall, half, and quarter-pound can lines. The canned salmon are shipped throughout the US and Canada, and even as far as Australia.
In 2007, the City of Craig solicited for a lease arrangement that would result in construction and operation of both the cold storage and seafood processing plant facilities. After a successful initial year of production in Sitka, Silver Bay Seafoods submitted its own proposal for a processing and freezing facility closely patterned after the Sitka plant.
The City of Craig Assembly unanimously chose Silver Bay's proposal, recognizing Silver Bay's competitive advantages such as possessing a unique combination of ownership interests, plant efficiencies, and an ability to maximize processing capacity due to fleet commitment that all position Silver Bay favorably in the seafood industry.
SBS Craig opened in 2009 with a daily processing peak capacity of 1.3 million round pounds. The plant primarily processes pink and chum salmon.
Silver Bay Seafoods built a new state-of-the-art plant in False Pass that opens for the 2019 fishing season. This plant provides a favorable geographic position to process salmon, pollock, and cod delivered by the Silver Bay Seafoods fleet from both the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea.
False Pass is a small Southwest Alaska fishing community located between the tip of the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands on Unimak Island. Named "False Pass" by early American sailing ship captains because it was thought to be impassable for their deep draft vessels at the northern end. "The Pass," as fishermen often refer to it today, is a marine passage between the Northern Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea used by vessels up to 200 feet in length.
Early 2010, Silver Bay acquired the Northern Reach Seafoods facility in the City of Valdez. Large scale improvements were done at the old plant during winter and spring, transforming its daily processing capacity from 250,000 round pounds of salmon to one (1) million round pounds.
In fall of 2015, construction work began for a new state-of-the-art processing facility on a five-acre site located directly across the street from the original facility. It is designed to increase the daily processing capacity to 2.7 million round pounds and to expand product forms to include ikura and salmon oil.
The City of Naknek is located 300 miles southwest of Anchorage on Bristol Bay and is the home of the world's largest commercial sockeye salmon fishery. Silver Bay commenced operations in May 2014 for the Togiak Herring Fishery and in June 2014 for the Bristol Bay Salmon Fishery.
The facility has an average daily processing capacity of 2.0 million round pounds with peak capacity of 2.4 million pounds. Two fillet lines were added in time for the 2015 season. A new 252-bed bunkhouse was constructed in fall of 2015 along with the installation of four more fillet lines with enough room for 6 more in the future.
In 2020, Silver Bay Seafoods began operating a seafood processing facility in Kodiak, Alaska located along “cannery row”. This facility processes salmon, pollock, cod, rockfish, flatfish and herring. This location is run by a primarily resident workforce in one of the largest capacity fishing ports in the country. The company plans to update and expand processing capacity within the coming years.
This new addition allows Kodiak area fishermen an opportunity to own their own processor and adds another strategic processing location for Silver Bay Seafoods to optimize fishing opportunity within the Gulf of Alaska.