Business

Wildfish Cannery was founded in Klawock, Alaska in the late 1980s by a school teacher named Phyllis Mueller. Her grandson Mathew Scaletta is at the helm these days.

Scaletta is passionate about food. He spent summers cutting fish at the cannery as a kid and then cut his teeth in the culinary world in Chicago and Portland. While working everywhere from bars to fine dining restaurants, he noticed something.

“Places were importing Spanish and Portuguese canned fish. It was kind of quietly becoming a thing,” Scaletta said. At the time, he said, canned salmon stateside was cheap – probably better for stocking a fallout shelter than a charcuterie board.

Then, Scaletta said he saw something that changed everything: an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show “No Reservations.”

In the episode, Bourdain visits Espinaler Taverna, a tavern in the Spanish seaside town of Vilassar de Mar. The bartop is lined with dozens of bowls of oily little fish, smoked oysters, and cured seafoods.

Bourdain samples a can of razor clams that his guide tells him costs more than $150 USD.

‘Rest assured this stuff bears no resemblance to the can of smoked oysters you ate stoned and desperate back in college,’ Bourdain narrates over the din of the packed tapas bar. ‘This is the world’s best seafood and here’s what’s so mind blowing: it only gets better in the can.’

“It kind of blew my mind to see that, right? And it stuck with me,” said Scaletta.

In 2015, Scaletta’s grandmother Phyllis was diagnosed with cancer. He came home to Alaska and took over the cannery.

Scaletta said he saw a hole in the market.

“So I set out to be the first U.S.-based highend craft cannery. And we’re still there,” he said. “I’m still working on that.”

Wildfish’s garlic sumac rockfish or smoked coho go for about $10-$14 a can. The most expensive offering is a $40 can of fried king salmon cheeks. Since Scaletta started smoking salmon for the slightly spendier masses, tinned fish is officially on the map in the U.S. But he doesn’t take credit for that.

“There were other companies who came in after us, who, frankly, just had a lot more money,” he laughed.

According to Scaletta, the business – and tinned fish in general – really took off in the United States in 2020. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2022, U.S. sales of canned seafood rose by nearly $3 billion and are still growing annually. Scaletta said he hopes to soon expand to a second cannery in Klawock. He said it’s hard to keep his more popular products in stock, nowadays, maybe partly due to some significant national attention on his company.

Marguerite Preston edits the kitchen section of Wirecutter, a product review outlet from the New York Times. As the editor, Preston doesn’t normally do the actual reviewing, but she said she really wanted to write a guide to tinned fish.

“Obviously, tinned fish has been around in all kinds of forms for centuries. In many cultures, it’s never gone out of style. But in America, it’s becoming trendy,” she said, adding that she’d been seeing sleek new brands of canned seafood everywhere. “I would say in the past maybe three years, maybe a little bit longer, we’ve just seen this growing interest, these trendy new brands, this beautiful packaging.”

Preston and her team collected over 100 different tins, jars, and cans of fish from Europe, Asia and the U.S. and laid them all out on the counter of their office in Brooklyn. They grouped the fish into categories and split up the tasting over three days.

“And then we just kind of went at it and felt really pretty ill at the end of each day to be honest,” she laughed.

Preston published her findings on Wirecutter’s website in December. The guide is like an Olympics for tinned fish, with each category crowning a world champion. Preston said when it came to sampling salmon, the unanimous favorite was Wildfish Cannery.

“I think the thing that stood out the most was the texture, it just had the most buttery, meaty, succulent texture. And then the flavor was really good too – the level of smoke. You can tell just by looking at them. They have this beautiful, kind of burnished look on top,” Preston said of Wildfish’s smoked king and sockeye salmon.

Scaletta said it was thrilling to see his small cannery getting national press. The art of canned fish isn’t a “new trend” to an Alaskan though. The state’s culture of home canning was a major inspiration for Wildfish.

“One of the most precious things an Alaskan has in your pantry is your home-pack – like your smoked and jarred salmon, right?” Scaletta said. “This is about taking what we already had, which was this culture of home-pack, and the idea of a jar of smoked salmon being elevated, and kind of bringing that to the masses.”

As tinned fish solidifies itself as a high class snack, Wildfish is going to continue to do what Alaska canneries have always done according to Scaletta – buying high-quality fish from local fishermen and canning it for the masses.

The Alaska Senate passed a bill Monday that would allow teenagers to serve alcohol at restaurants and a variety of other businesses. The bill would lower the minimum age to serve alcohol from 21 to 18.

If the bill becomes law, 18-year-olds could serve alcohol in breweries, distilleries, wineries, hotels, lodges, resorts and restaurants. The minimum age to serve in a licensed bar or any venue offering “adult entertainment,” though, would remain 21.

“Senate Bill 15 strikes a responsible balance between economic opportunity and public safety,” Sen. Kelly Merrick, R-Anchorage and the bill sponsor, said on the Senate floor. “It supports Alaskan businesses and workforce while ensuring that alcohol regulations remain clear and enforceable.”

The restaurant industry is backing the bill. The head of the state’s largest hospitality group told lawmakers that lowering the minimum serving age would help alleviate a labor shortage.

“Employers struggle to promote or retain quality employees who are 18-20 years of age because they are prohibited from serving alcohol or supervising other employees who serve or sell alcohol,” Sarah Harlow, the president and CEO of the Alaska Cabaret, Hotel, Restaurant and Retailers Association said in a letter to lawmakers. “Alaska is not competitive in this space, and our industry is experiencing an outmigration of young workers.”

Alaska is one of just three states, along with Nevada and Utah, to require restaurant servers to be 21 or older, according to documents filed alongside the bill.

Support for dropping the minimum serving age was not universal — the head of an anti-alcohol abuse advocacy group told a Senate committee the move could normalize underage drinking and undermine public health efforts.

The bill would also tweak alcohol laws surrounding theater performances, allowing theaters to continue serving until an hour after the show, rather than having to stop after intermission.

The bill would also require bars and other businesses selling alcohol, like liquor stores, to post signs warning that alcohol is linked to an elevated risk of cancer.

A similar bill passed in the final moments of last year’s session. But because the bill passed after midnight on the final day of the session allowed by the Alaska Constitution, Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it.

The bill passed the Senate unanimously. It now heads to the state House.

No rocket launches are scheduled as of yet for this year at the spaceport on Kodiak Island, but the head of the Alaska Aerospace Corporation is hoping to capitalize on what’s becoming a national shortage of launch space in the Lower 48.

According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, there were a record 145 orbital missions launched from the U.S. in 2023. That’s a five time increase since 2017.

The bulk of these launches are conducted by the U.S. government and companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin, which had its New Glenn rocket successfully launch from Florida on Jan. 16 for its inaugural flight into orbit. These entities mainly use three key spaceports: Cape Canaveral in Florida, which is federal, Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, which is also federal, and the SpaceX Starbase in Texas.

Alaska Aerospace’s president and CEO John Oberst went on NBC’s “Today” show earlier this month to discuss what is being described as a “traffic jam” at the country’s spaceports and how Alaska’s facilities could relieve that congestion.

“Now is the time because we offer availability. We can take a customer and get them up on time,” Oberst said. “We are not congested.”

At the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska, near Narrow Cape on Kodiak Island, potential customers could launch satellites, support space missions or test government defense projects.

The spaceport is licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration to have up to nine launches per year. That facility’s last successful launch was in 2022. Two other attempts, one each in 2023 and 2024, all failed.

But at this point, Oberst said via email that no commercial launches are on the books yet for the island spaceport. He added that new customers are interested in launching from Kodiak Island. But he said he cannot release any more information until they sign commitments.

California-based companies ABL Space Systems and Astra are already usual customers. SpaceX is not one of those customers and does not launch from the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska on Kodiak Island, but the company does have an antenna set up at the facility.

Oberst previously told KMXT that he expects at least a few launches this calendar year, featuring both commercial and government customers.

When a launch is scheduled, a public notice must be given 30 days in advance.

Late one night in January, a reporter sat working on the floor of an orange building in Haines. The building is home to the small town’s police department, fire station and morgue – plus the borough assembly chambers, which are often packed with concerned citizens.

The journalist, Rashah McChesney, isn’t just a reporter. She also owns the local newspaper, the Chilkat Valley News. The weekly paper has a circulation of 1,200 during the summer and 1,000 in winter. About 2,500 people live in the Haines Borough.

McChesney was covering the local assembly meeting – and was one of the last people there. That meant she was standing by when a heated exchange broke out between two borough officials in the parking lot.

The next morning – McChesney’s deadline day – her malamute Klondike strutted around her office while she talked shop with a local reporter. The reporter asked how McChesney planned to describe the incident.

“Oh, I’m just going to say, ‘Shouted a string of obscenities at him in the parking lot,’” McChesney said. “Because print is boring.”

Be that as it may, print is what brought McChesney to Haines last April. She bought the paper after a decade in public radio, including several years at KTOO in Juneau.

McChesney made the move even as news organizations across Alaska and the U.S. increasingly struggle to stay afloat amid soaring costs, declining readership and the explosive rise of social media.

Just 15% of Americans say they’ve paid for local news in the last year, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center. And of those who do get their news from daily newspapers, the vast majority access the content online.

The result: more than 3,200 print newspapers closed over the last two decades, according to a 2024 report by Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative.

One-hundred-and-thirty print newspapers shut down between October of 2023 and October of 2024 alone.

In Alaska, papers including the Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, Peninsula Clarion and Homer News have scaled back printing, citing readers’ growing preference for reading the news online.

Which is why McChesney isn’t just focused on Haines. She also recently co-founded a nonprofit called The Alaska News Coalition — a group of publishers and journalists around the state working to help independent, local news organizations stay in business.

“By and large, there’s a lot of publishers who are experts at making papers, and who have struggled to modernize their organizations digitally,” McChesney said. “I feel like I am building a collaboration with a group of people who really want what they were doing successfully in print, to be successful in digital, and maybe don’t necessarily understand or have the capacity to do that.”

The effort got a big boost in October, when it received a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a national news initiative funded by philanthropy organizations. The Alaska-based coalition pools resources and ideas and provides grants to newspapers to help them digitize their work and distribute news.

All of this might make McChesney, a 41-year-old millennial, seem like a bit of an anomaly. But she says she decided to go all-in on local news in Alaska for a simple reason.

“Communities want local news. That’s why we have public radio stations that work as well as they do,” she said. “I think there’s this sort of myth that a small-town paper is just sort of like a losing proposition. And I just — I don’t buy that.”

“Haines’s paper is doing fine. It’s not making a ton of money, I’m not making a ton of money. But this [community] has consistently financially supported its paper since it opened in 1966,” she added.

McChesney said it’s been exciting to work alongside publishers of other Alaskan papers, including the Wrangell Sentinel and the Ketchikan Daily News, to reduce the likelihood that any more communities will lose their newspapers.

It’s also difficult, given that McChesney runs a business and reports the news at the same time.

That work is made even more interesting by the place where it happens. Haines is known for being politically divided and highly engaged. McChesney thinks that can make reporting challenging. But she also thinks it’s indicative of something bigger.

“People don’t fight about stuff they don’t care about. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference,” she said. “You can’t accuse this town of being indifferent.”

Owning a newspaper in small-town Alaska also means something else. At least in Haines, she can’t ever just be “Rashah.”

“I don’t get a lot of [taking]-my-newspaper-hat-off time. If I want to do that, I’d go out into the Porcupine District and run around with my dog,” she said. “But I think that’s sort of the pressure of being a small-town journalist in general.”

After robust public comment, the Haines Borough Assembly voted to reconfirm the preferred design for the rebuild of its freight dock on Tuesday.

Assembly members who voted yes said the measure was necessary to meet grant deadlines and show that Haines was serious about the project.

Both the Planning Commission and the previous assembly voted in support of contractor Turnagain Marine Construction’s plan for the aging Lutak Dock in 2023. But community concerns about cost and environmental impacts, and legal problems with the contractor, have stalled the project.

The dock receives food and fuel for the remote town of Haines. The borough was awarded a $20 million grant in 2021 to update the infrastructure. The grant is overseen by the U.S. Department of Transportation – Maritime Administration, or MARAD.

Turnagain, the contractor, purchased approximately $10 million of steel piping for the project, but MARAD deemed those supplies ineligible for grant reimbursement. Turnagain billed the municipality for the steel and Haines declined to pay – then Turnagin sued the borough. The lawsuit triggered mediation between the two parties. They’re still working out who is responsible for the $10 million.

Alekka Fullerton is Haines’ interim borough manager. She says the guaranteed maximum price of $25 million for dock construction is still in place. It’s one of the issues contested by the contractor.

Fullerton told the assembly that the process has been confusing for many.

“I think I heard in a previous assembly meeting that there were questions coming from Southeast Conference, or maybe some other entities in Juneau, really unclear about what the Haines Borough is doing … I have even heard some of those questions from our congressional delegations and some of the people who have, in fact, made sure we have money available for this.”

While the assembly reconfirmed the design with a four to two vote, a majority of the Jan. 14 public comment was against the design.

Haines resident Katie Palmer testified about possible financial ramifications.

“Do not recommit the borough to a project we cannot afford,” she said. “Do not commit the citizens of Haines to pay for a project whose costs will exceed the grant monies. As Assembly member Gabe Thomas stated months ago, a bond is off the table.”

Kimberly Rosado was concerned about the cost of not fixing the dock.

“I want everybody to think what would happen if that dock failed right now, and the prices we would have to pay to ship it around,” she said. “We already pay so much for our groceries. To double or triple that, I don’t know who could afford to live here with that cost. So please get this back on track and fix our dock.”

While some residents testified that they hoped for a smaller design, one dock user said the space is necessary.

Haynes Tormey is a contractor who is intimately familiar with Lutak Dock.

“The existing footprint as it is right now at peak usage is barely enough,” he said. “There’s actually times when I’ve been forced to take freight that I’m not ready for so passing through freight can have a spot on the dock. So essentially, what needs to happen is the temporary guardrails that are in place need to be removed. So that way, the dock’s acreage could be expanded to its original footprint.”

Assembly member Kevin Forster wanted to delay the vote until mediation with Turnagain was complete. He and Assembly member Craig Loomis voted against the resolution.

Assembly member Cheryl Stickler said the borough should move forward with the project.

“We can’t afford the money. We can’t afford the time. And every day that we are stalled on this project, we are one day closer to dock failure,” Stickler said. “I just encourage us all to consider those things and to take steps to open up the conversations with Turnagain. This is our budget. This is our design. What can you do with this design within budget?”

The borough provided its environmental assessment of the dock plan to MARAD at the end of last year. That document is still confidential.

How much are Alaskans willing to pay for produce that is homegrown? A newly published study has some answers: a significant premium, especially when they have information about the benefits of locally grown food.

Alaska grocery shoppers on average were willing to pay $1.90 extra for a head of lettuce if it was labeled as “Alaska Grown,” the study found. When given information about locally grown products’ benefits to health, the environment and the state economy provided by products with the “Alaska Grown” label, that premium jumped to $3.31 on average, the study found.

The study is based on surveys and interviews of shoppers at Anchorage grocery stores and farmers markets. The surveys and interviews were conducted by University of Alaska Anchorage students; the study was led by Qiujie Zheng, an associate professor of business analytics at the University of Maine. Zheng was previously at UAA.

While the surveys and interviews were conducted several years ago, in 2018, Zheng said she believes the results still stand.

The COVID-19 pandemic that came later may have changed food consumption patterns worldwide, she said by email. “However, due to Alaska’s unique geographical location, I believe that the state’s agricultural supply and consumers’ fresh produce options have remained relatively stable over the past few years,” she said.

There has been no interruption in the Alaska Division of Agriculture’s annual Alaska Grown $5 Challenge program, a summer and fall campaign that encourages residents to spend at least $5 a week on locally grown food, she noted. The information the researchers used from the state has been consistent, she added.

It was important to study consumer preferences for Alaska Grown products because the subject has gotten much less attention than consumer attitudes about local foods elsewhere, Zheng said.

And Alaska has reasons to bolster its local sources of food, she said.

“Alaska’s unique geographical location significantly influences its food supply. Since the majority of Alaska’s food is imported, Alaska’s food supply is vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and natural disasters,” she said by email. “A stronger local food system could improve the resilience of the state’s food supply. Understanding consumers’ preferences for local foods and identifying potential marketing and communication strategies are critical before promoting local food in Alaska. This helps strengthen the local food network, and, in the long run, enhances the resilience of Alaska’s food supply.”

The study also analyzed consumer preferences about lettuce labeled as organic and lettuce grown through the hydroponic method, which uses a water-based nutrient solution as a substitute for soil.

Taken in isolation, the Alaska Grown premium that consumers were willing to pay was higher than that for organic food and for hydroponic-grown lettuce. Without being given extra information about benefits, consumers were willing to spend $1.74 more for organic lettuce and 73 cents more for hydroponic-grown lettuce.

Consumer preferences were more complicated when the Alaska Grown, organic and hydroponic labels were combined and when additional information was provided, the study found.