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The Independent
30-01-2025
- General
- The Independent
A food bank netted a huge haul of 13,000 fresh salmon. The catch? The fish were still alive
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.'
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- General
- Yahoo
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.' Michael Hill, The Associated Press Sign in to access your portfolio
New York Times
30-01-2025
- Business
- New York Times
A Fish Farm Offered 40,000 Pounds of Salmon for Free. There Was a Catch.
The offer was too good for the Food Bank of Central New York to pass up. A local fish farm was going out of business, and it wanted to donate more than 40,000 pounds of sushi-grade salmon. There was one big hitch: All that free salmon was in the form of 13,312 live fish. Like any good fish story, the saga of the salmon — from a high-end fish-farm start-up with clients like Nobu and FreshDirect to the plates of needy New Yorkers — soon swelled into an epic tale. It came to involve dozens of volunteer fish-catchers, members of the Onondaga Nation and a guy willing to donate 10,000 bags of ice. It began with bad news: LocalCoho, a salmon farming operation that was considered exemplary because of its sustainable practices when it opened in 2017, was shutting down on Jan. 31. The company, based in Auburn, N.Y., had drawn praise for aquaculture that raised salmon in tanks on land, sparing the environment from pollutants inherent in ocean-based fish farming. But despite being well-received and seeming to have regular investment, LocalCoho struggled to make a profit, according to an article in which first reported the full story of the fish donation. Early on Jan. 2, Meghan Durso, a manager at TDO, a Syracuse nonprofit, took a frantic phone call from LocalCoho's owner, Andre Bravo, about what to do with all his fancy fish. He was prepared to give the salmon away, but he didn't know where to start. 'He said, 'Hey, we are going to throw these in the dumpster,'' Ms. Durso recalled. 'And I said: 'Hey, wait.'' But the task facing her team was giant. They found takers for tons of live fish — including the Food Bank of Central New York and the Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance — but that was just the beginning. They would also need people to scoop each of the thousands of salmon from their tanks in Auburn, people to ship them on ice to a processor and people to turn the fish into fillets. And they had only days to do it before LocalCoho closed for good. Calls and emails to Mr. Bravo were not returned. Reached by phone, Adam Kramarsyck, a manager for LocalCoho, said he was not permitted by the company to comment. Then the iceman came: Shawn Salle, the operations manager of Brown Carbonic, a Syracuse business that runs the Ice Company of Elmira, answered the call. His grandparents, who founded the company, long supported the food bank, Mr. Salle said, so his response was easy: Where should he send his freezer trucks? Ultimately Mr. Salle supplied five employees, two trucks and 10,000 pounds of ice to the project, at no charge. 'It really wasn't a question of if we will,' he said. 'It was, How can we help and what do you need?' Back at the Central New York Food Bank, Andrew Katzer, the director of procurement, was also busy working the phones. He was delighted to take the fish, but he would need to find a company that could clean, gut and debone more than 20 tons of salmon. There was also the matter of drumming up volunteers. Ultimately 42 helpers would spend the week in LocalCoho's tanks, wearing rubber waders and netting the fish, placing them in ice baths and loading the cold, slippery creatures into the refrigerated trucks. Mr. Katzer was right there with the volunteers in the tanks. 'The fish, they often don't want to be caught,' he said. 'You get very wet.' JD & Sons Seafood, a Rochester wholesaler, offered to fillet the fish at a steep discount, Mr. Katzer said. The last of the fish left for Rochester on Wednesday; the next step will be distributing the fillets to the food bank's partner organizations — more than 300 across 11 New York counties. The total operation has cost about $30,000, according to the bank. Until recently, Local Coho salmon went for $17.99 a pound on the Fresh Direct website, making the approximate market value of the donation more than $700,000. About 250 salmon were picked up by members of the Onondaga Nation, who filled two pickup trucks with coolers to take to their land, on a day so cold the fish stayed frozen solid, said Curtis Waterman, a member of the Beaver Clan who works as a hunter-gatherer fisherman for the Onondaga Nation Farm, about 20 miles south of Syracuse. There, before filleting the salmon, Mr. Waterman and his colleagues gave the animals a traditional thank you for their sacrifice in the Onondaga language, he said. Then the fish was flavored in a slightly less traditional manner, with teriyaki, brown sugar, salt and pepper, and then smoked, before the about 9,000 servings of salmon were packaged to be given away to the nation. 'I've had a lot of smoked salmon,' Mr. Waterman said. 'This was good.'
NBC News
30-01-2025
- General
- NBC News
A food bank netted a huge haul of 13,000 fresh salmon. The catch? The fish were still alive
AUBURN, N.Y. — 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 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.'
Boston Globe
30-01-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
A food bank netted a huge haul of 13,000 fresh salmon. The catch? The fish were still alive.
And they'd need to do it fast, before the business closed for good. LocalCoho is ceasing operations this Friday. Advertisement 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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up '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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.'
