A food bank netted a huge haul of 13,000 fresh salmon. The catch? The fish were still alive

AUBURN, N.Y. (AP) — A New York food bank was offered a huge donation of fresh fish this month — but it came with a catch.

LocalCoho, a soon-to-close salmon farm in the small upstate city of Auburn, wanted to give 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) of coho salmon to the Food Bank of Central New York, a mother lode of high-quality protein that could feed thousands of families.

But the fish were still alive and swimming in the farm’s giant indoor tanks. The organizations would need to figure out how to get some 13,000 salmon from the water and then have them processed into frozen fillets for distribution to regional food pantries.

And they’d need to do it fast, before the business closed for good. LocalCoho is ceasing operations this Friday.

Thanks to dozens of food pantry volunteers willing to help staffers scoop up the salmon, the team was able to empty the tanks in a matter of weeks and cold pack tons of fish for shipment to a processor.

“The fact that we only had weeks to execute this really ratcheted up the intensity and the anxiety a little bit,” said Brian McManus, the food bank’s chief operations officer. “I knew that we had the will. I knew we had the expertise.”

Tackling food waste has been a daunting challenge for years both in the U.S. and around the world. More than one-third of the food produced in the U.S. is never eaten and much of it ends up in landfills.

On a recent day, workers waded through knee-deep water teeming with salmon to fill their nets. Christina Hudson Kohler was among the volunteers who donned waterproof overalls and gloves to grab the fish-laden nets and empty their contents into cold storage containers.

“It’s a little bit different,” Kohler said during a break. “In the past, my volunteer work with the food bank has been sorting carrots or peppers, or gleaning out in the field.”

LocalCoho is a startup that had been piloting a sustainable salmon farming system employing recirculated water. Its facility west of Syracuse had been supplying coho salmon to wholesalers and retailers, including high-end Manhattan sushi restaurants, with the goal of building regional farms across the country.

But company officials said they could not raise enough capital to expand and become profitable. Thus, they decided to wrap things up at the end of January.

With a shutdown looming, farm manager Adam Kramarsyck said they didn’t want the fish to go to waste or end up as biofuel. That's when they reached out to see if the fish could be donated as food.

“It’s ‘lemonade out of lemons,’ I guess is the phrase,” Kramarsyck said.

LocalCoho can process about 600 fish a week by hand. But there was less than a month to clear the tanks of many times that number of fish.

Enter the food bank.

McManus was excited by the offer to land so many fish — and nervous about the challenge. But while the Syracuse-based operation knew how to distribute canned or frozen seafood, they’re not set up to handle fresh fish. How could they turn thousands of fish into frozen fillets in a tight time frame?

Kramarsyck said it took “tons and tons of logistics.”

The food bank enlisted 42 volunteers to help out. A local business with refrigerated trucks, Brown Carbonic, offered to ship the fish for free to a processor an hour away in Rochester. And LocalCoho staff pitched in to get the job done in time.

“A lot of companies going out of business would just be like, ‘Take what you can get, we’ll do the best we can.’ I mean, they’re working extra hard,” said Andrew Katzer, the food bank’s director of procurement.

The salmon was being processed and quick-frozen. It will be distributed soon among 243 food pantries, as well as soup kitchens, shelters and other institutions in the food bank’s network.

All told, the catch is expected to yield more than 26,000 servings of hard-to-source protein for the hungry.

“Protein, animal protein is very, very desirable. We know that people need it for nourishment and it’s difficult to get. And so this is going to make a very large impact," said McManus.

“I don’t anticipate this being here very long,'' he added. "We’ve had salmon before, but not like this.”