Peter Pan Seafoods Announces Shutdown of Alaskan Processing Operations

Peter Pan Seafoods, one of Alaska’s biggest fish plants, said on Friday that it would be closing down for good.

In a social media post, the company said that it would be closing its processing plants and ending “both summer and winter production cycles for the foreseeable future.”

Peter Pan Seafoods has been in business since 1950 and has its headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. It also has four full processing plants in Alaska, located in King Cove, Port Moller, Dillingham, and Valdez, according to its website. Along with those two main sites, it also runs two satellite plants in Sand Point and Naknek. The business said that its King Cove plant is the biggest in the state for processing fish.

The company told Peter Pan workers to look for work at Silver Bay Seafoods, which is also a big Alaskan seafood business. Silver Bay is a much younger company that has been in business since 2007. It has six processing plants in Alaska and the West Coast. The main office of Silver Bay is in Seattle, Washington.

The announcement on Friday comes at a time when Alaska’s seafood business is generally getting better after a rough 2020 season caused by COVID-19.

Trident Seafoods, Alaska’s largest fish processor with 11 plants across the state, announced a major reorganization plan last year that included selling four processing plants in Alaska. The Seafood Marketing Institute said in a report from 2022 that 70% of Alaska’s manufacturing jobs were in the seafood processing business.

Peter Pan Seafoods changed hands in January 2021 when Northwest Fish Co., the Na’-Nuk Investment Fund, and RRG Capital Management joined forces to run the business. McKinley Capital Management is in charge of Na’-Nuk.