Seafood workers walk along Kodiak’s cannery row, a waterfront edge of town lined with seafood processing facilities.
One of the workers is Chris Sannito, who manages Kodiak Island Wildsource. It’s a small plant compared to the neighboring ones owned by big processing companies, like Pacific Seafood or Silver Bay Seafoods. But it’s still part of some of Kodiak’s biggest fisheries.
“We participate in cod fisheries, halibut processing, salmon when we can get it,” Sannito said.
The plant, owned by the Sun’aq Tribe of Kodiak, runs year round and usually works with commercial and sport fishermen. About five years ago, the facility added kelp to its processing lineup.
“We’ve blanched it, we’ve dried it, we’ve ground it, acid stabilized it, different forms every year,” Sannito said.
The poundage varies widely, from as little as 40,000 pounds processed last year to a few hundred thousand pounds of kelp a few years ago, according to Sannito.
And now Wildsource is about to get an upgrade for its kelp processing capabilities. Earlier this month it was awarded a $2.3 million grant from the Southeast Conference, an economic development organization. That money comes from a $49 million federal grant awarded back in 2022 to invest in the state’s mariculture industry.
“It’s geared to up our output significantly, and we’ll be able to diversify the products that we make,” he said.
Some new products include biopolymers – which are a sort of biodegradable plastic – as well as cosmetics or process kelp to mix with soil for agriculture.
Sannito said it could also be a game changer for the types of equipment the plant will eventually house.
“We’ll have unloading equipment, choppers, grinders, agitation tanks, centrifuges, so we can spin off different components, dryers, so we can dry parts of it,” he said.
Sannito said the investment hopefully will create a better market for Kodiak’s five current kelp growers, and diversify the plant’s capabilities.
“This is a big chance for us, and we’re at the crossroads for our company, and it’s a huge decision for us to take land that we have – that we were thinking of growing into fish processing with – but we’re going to go for the mariculture processing and see what we can do with that,” he said.
Mariculture isn’t the only change coming to Wildsource though.
Across the street from the plant, the Tribe is finishing construction on a new building for Wildsource’s offices as well as a retail space and a seafood cafe.
“We have a commercial kitchen in here and we’ll have different light offerings – seafood themed bagels and lox and just kind of easy walk up type dishes, maybe some hot fish sandwiches,” Sannito said.
He said the building will likely open early next year.
