At the mouth of the Naknek River in Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the world's largest salmon run, set-netter Nathan Hill and his crew pull sockeye from a 100-yard net, cut the gills to bleed each fish and bag them in cold bay water for ice on shore, Ben Seal reports for the Food and Environment Reporting Network with Offrange. 'We're kind of snobby about our salmon,' one crew member says.

While salmon runs decline elsewhere, Bristol Bay's month-long sockeye run has held steady — 79 million fish in 2022, 60 million of them harvested; this year's catch of roughly 30 million is more typical. Nearly all of it goes to processors controlled by three companies after a wave of consolidation: Seattle-based Trident Seafoods, the Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco) of the Jim Pattison Group, and Silver Bay Seafoods, founded in 2007. A decade ago ten or more large processors worked the bay; fishermen recite the names — Leader Creek, E&E, Ocean Beauty, Icicle, Peter Pan — like fallen friends.

Processors set the price, and in Bristol Bay it has hardly budged since the 1980s, when a voracious Japanese market briefly pushed it past US$2 a pound — still the high-water mark despite nearly 200% inflation. The 2022 glut cratered the base price from US$1.15 a pound to 50 cents in 2023; Peter Pan closed in 2024 and sold plants to Silver Bay, which last year bought OBI Seafoods and this season effectively took over the start-up Northline. Fishermen have struck over prices and twice sued for price-fixing, in 1981 and 2003; juries sided with the processors both times.

Consolidation has renewed interest in small processors and direct sales. Amanda Wlaysewski's Kvichak Fish, started in 2012, fillets, vacuum-seals and freezes salmon on cutting boards rather than machinery, processing about a quarter of a million pounds a season for 400 pre-ordering families in Montana, Idaho and Oregon and for fishermen who sell at home, and paying a base of US$2 a pound. 'We process as much fish in an entire season as a cannery does before their first coffee break,' she says; state biologist Travis Elison notes the big processors' capacity is what keeps spawning beds from being overrun.

Late this season Silver Bay raised its price to US$2 and Trident followed, against a much smaller harvest and falling supply from Alaska and Russia; sources in the fishery read it as a bid for market share, and many fishermen expect prices to sink again next year. 'If you get away from the big corporate model,' says Hill, president of his tribal council in Kokhanok, 'it really lends itself to people being more equitably treated' — in a statewide seafood industry worth more than US$5 billion a year.

Source: Food and Environment Reporting Network (with Offrange)