She served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines, where she helped a village start to restore its coral reef fishery, and spent a year in Vietnam, where she picked up basic business skills helping a friend who ran an international consulting firm there.
Philippines RPCV Laura Anderson opens Local Ocean Seafoods in Newport Oregon
Our coastal neighbors
Local Ocean Seafoods helps buyers to know their fish -- and their fisherman
by DAN SADOWSKY | posted 09.15.05
NEWPORT, OREGON -- Laura Anderson, a third-generation commercial fisherman and a leader in Oregon's sustainable fisheries movement, wants to give diners and fish buyers at her newly opened Local Ocean Seafoods "the best seafood experience of their lives." But she also wants to teach them how they can help sustain local fishing communities.
By educating consumers about the premium-quality wild fish she sells, she says she adds a "social value" to the transaction that enables her to pay local harvesters more than large commercial processors. That helps support traditional fishing families and promote a more equitable fishing economy along Oregon's central coast.
"We have access to some of the most valuable natural capital on this planet," says Anderson, a tall, fair-skinned woman whose easygoing manner belies a fierce commitment to local fishermen. "Our job is to get the most value for it."
Where a ramshackle coffee shop once stood on Newport's Historic Bayfront, the 34-year-old Anderson and her business partner, longtime fisherman Al Pazar, have created a place unlike any other eatery in town. The 3,000-square-foot interior is clean, bright and airy, with white cement walls, marine-colored accents and a kitchen that's separated from diners by only a waist-high wall. Floor-to-ceiling windows with roll-up glass doors afford views across Bay Boulevard to the fishing boats anchored in the harbor and the Yaquina Bay Bridge in the distance.
Anderson's business has been making waves since 2002. While Local Ocean's processing space, cafe and fish market were under construction, the company started selling salmon, tuna and other locally caught wild fish to specialty markets in Seattle, to Whole Foods Markets nationwide, and, more recently, to upscale restaurants in Portland. Retail customers have streamed in since the cafe and fish counter opened in late June.
"We've been open for three weeks, and it's been a smashing success," Anderson says wearily. Local Ocean's menu features both local and non-local seafood, most sustainably harvested and all wild-caught. Besides the best-selling $2.95 tuna taco, other "small plate" offerings include crab cocktail, steamed clams and Dungeness crab cakes. A $7 King Salmon Burger with fries headlines the list of five sandwiches, while platters include pan-fried oysters from the bay and tuna fillet for $10 to $15.
In between the lunch and dinner crowds on a cloudless Wednesday afternoon, Anderson removes her server's apron and takes a rare break at a sun-drenched table by the window. She and her staff are clad in Salmon Nation t-shirts -- a public recognition, she says, "of the connectivity of our landscape and our oceans across a broad area. There's a connection we're trying to foster here, and this is the icon we're using to identify that."
In the course of an hourlong conversation, Anderson returns frequently to the idea of forging connections. It's the essence of Local Ocean's "know your fish" mantra. In showcasing the best seafood, she hopes to communicate the importance of eating locally harvested fish and of knowing the who, where, and how of the food we eat.
That message is on view in the refrigerated case by the cash register, where you'll see that the pink slab of King salmon selling for $12.85 a pound was caught and frozen at sea by fishermen on the boat Summerplace, based in Newport, using a hook and line. The same information accompanies wholesale orders shipped to restaurants in Portland or markets in Seattle. "That's adding value in a social sense," she says, "because it's creating a connection between the fisherman and the buyer, it's telling a story. People are really responding to that."
Anderson's own story begins in Westport, Washington, an old fishing town due west of Olympia. She started catching salmon and crabs with her dad, a small-scale commercial fisherman, when the family moved to Newport in the early 1980s. But she didn't think of her own future in the industry until, as a biology major at Pacific Lutheran College in Tacoma, she developed an interest in oceanography. After graduation, she served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines, where she helped a village start to restore its coral reef fishery, and spent a year in Vietnam, where she picked up basic business skills helping a friend who ran an international consulting firm there.
After returning to the U.S., Anderson earned a master's degree in Marine Resource Management from Oregon State University in 2000 and became a consultant to nonprofits who were trying to improve the coastal fish industry through ecological restoration, salmon marketing and community-based fisheries management. In Port Orford, Oregon, Anderson spearheaded a highly visible effort that sought to give local fishermen a greater voice and more responsibility in figuring out how to restore depleted fish stocks.
But it was a consulting contract back in Newport, in 2002, which led her to swap advocacy for action. Anderson was hired by a local landowner to solicit proposals for a fisheries-oriented business on a lot he owned across from Yaquina Bay. After a conversation with Pazar, a longtime family friend who owns several fishing vessels and a seafood market in Florence, the two decided to launch Local Ocean Seafoods.
"I realized there's a demand here and a supply for this. Finding good quality fish isn't necessarily the problem, finding customers for good quality fish isn't necessarily the problem, but getting that fish from the boat to the customer is."
When it launched, Local Ocean Seafoods was able to pay about 25 cents a pound over the market price to its suppliers by buying from fishermen committed to high quality and by finding customers willing to pay a premium for that quality. Now that the market for salmon and some other species is commanding higher prices across the board, Anderson says she's not always able to afford to pay more.
"It just depends on the market," explains Anderson. "I just paid a 25 cents premium for fresh albacore today because the market will allow that. I want it to be equitable. I know what I can sell it for, so I take the percentage I need."
Can her fishermen-first buying practices affect the larger seafood market in Newport? Fishing is a big industry in town, Anderson responds, and she doesn't want Local Ocean Seafoods to grow too large. But she does want to influence the market in other ways.
"We want to enhance our economic impact by creating a space, both physically and in marketing terms, for like-minded entrepreneurs," she says. "That's one of the things I learned in my Salmon Nation work with Ecotrust: how to co-market a commodity in a way that allows the hardworking people involved to maintain their identities while emphasizing a broad message."
Tidepool is supported in part by Ecotrust, which founded Tidepool as a project in 1997 and incubated it until Tidepool's independence in 2004.
