Auburn company rushes to donate 30,000 lbs. of salmon to CNY families, but time’s running out
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Editor’s Note: On Jan. 24, LocalCoho updated the amount of salmon it’s donating to the Food Bank of CNY to 46,000 lbs. total weight, equivalent to approximately 20,000 lbs. of filets.
Central New York businesses are working against the clock to deliver roughly 30,000 pounds of premium coho salmon filets to some of the region’s neediest families.
That’s equivalent to 20,000 fish, each weighing between two to eight pounds.
The hitch? All those salmon are still swimming around in large, concrete pools at LocalCoho, an aquafarming company in Auburn that’s shutting down at the end of the month.
Getting all those fish from pool to plate in less than three weeks is a daunting challenge, said Brian McManus, chief operating officer of the Food Bank of Central New York.
“It’s absolutely unprecedented,” McManus said. “That’s not an item that we can handle. We don’t have the capability. We don’t have the certification. We don’t have the knowledge to do it.”
LocalCoho already donated a few hundred pounds of salmon to the Onondaga Nation and the Cayuga Nation, but that’s just a drop in the bucket.
Thanks to a Herculean effort from a handful of companies and dozens of volunteers, LocalCoho last week began shipping thousands of pounds of salmon to a facility in Rochester where the fish are processed, packaged, and then trucked to the Food Bank’s freezers in Baldwinsville.
If all goes according to plan, the Food Bank of CNY will soon receive enough salmon filets to fill a tractor trailer.
Sushi-grade salmon
LocalCoho farms a type of Pacific salmon highly regarded for its taste and texture in a high-tech facility close to its East Coast customers, which include swanky Manhattan sushi joints such as Nobu and Hasaki.
“One sushi restaurant has 14 or 15 menu items and every single one of them is flown in fresh daily from Japan,” said Adam Kramarsyck, LocalCoho’s farm manager. “Then right next to it there’s LocalCoho, from Auburn, New York. It’s something we hang our hat on, to be at that level.”
Meat protein of any kind is in high demand at the Food Bank, McManus said. And frozen fish is always a popular item. But 30,000 pounds of “very high-quality protein” is unlike any donation he’s ever seen.
“I don’t think it’ll be in our hands very long,” McManus said.
The race to donate the last batch of LocalCoho’s salmon began a few weeks ago when the company reached out to TDO, a Syracuse-based not-for-profit that helps area companies solve thorny manufacturing problems.
“They didn’t want the fish to go in a dumpster,” said TDO’s Meghan Durso, an expert in putting the right people in the right place at the right time.
“We've mobilized a pretty fast team to take a negative and turn it into a positive for our region,” she said
The Food Bank of CNY happily agreed to take the salmon, but they needed it in a form they could use: frozen filets.
LocalCoho isn’t set up to process fish in such large quantities. In a typical week they might ship 600 whole, gutted fish to wholesale markets on the East Coast, not 6,000. The Food Bank of CNY found a company in Rochester to process the fish, but they didn’t have a way transport them.
Shawn Salle, operations manager for Brown Carbonic, an ice and beverage company based in East Syracuse, didn’t hesitate when he got the call last week requesting refrigerator trucks.
“I was like, oh my gosh, that’s perfect,” Salle said. “It’s in line with our values. And it’s like four degrees out, so we’re not moving the ice. We had the trucks idle, and we were able to spare them for this project.”
The Great Salmon Swap
With most of the puzzle pieces in place, all that was needed to pull off the Great Salmon Swap was manpower. Scooping 60,000 pounds of fish required many more hands than what LocalCoho’s 12 employees could provide.
The Food Bank of CNY and the Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance put out calls to their dedicated volunteer lists. More than 100 people immediately signed up for the novel opportunity.
“A typical volunteer opportunity may be sorting or packing boxes of produce for distribution,” said Andrew Katzer, director of procurement for the Food Bank of CNY. “You’re not typically fighting with bags of orange and apples. So it’s unique.”
Kramarsyck estimated the volunteers might be able to move about 600 fish per day; now they’re doubling that number.
“We started slow in the beginning,” Kramarsyck said. But since last week “we really seemed to hit our stride. We’ve been doing anywhere from about 1,200 to 2,500 fish per day.”
A Model for the Future
McManus said food banks across the country will be looking closely at how the Food Bank of CNY, LocalCoho, Brown Carbonic, and all the volunteers managed to pull off this one-of-a-kind donation with such speed and efficiency. There’s important lessons to be learned, he said.
“It’s sad this company has gone out of business,” McManus said. “But they made the most of the situation.”
Despite attracting a loyal and consistent customer base over the past three years, the market for high-end salmon isn’t strong enough to keep LocalCoho in the black. Seven of the company’s 12 employees are now looking for jobs.
Still, it’s satisfying to know that somewhere in CNY a struggling single mom will soon be able to put the same sublime salmon on her dinner table, at no cost to her, that Wall Street investment bankers have been eating for the past few years.
-Courtesy of Steve Featherstone, Syracuse.com, and This Is CNY.
Steve Featherstone covers the outdoors for The Post-Standard, syracuse.com and NYUP.com. Contact him at sfeatherstone@syracuse.com or on Twitter @featheroutdoors. You can also follow along with all of our outdoors content at newyorkupstate.com/outdoors/ or follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/upstatenyoutdoors.
