King of Fish Sticks

In 1981, Bundrant built a processing plant on Akutan, a tiny outcropping of rock so far east in the Aleutian Islands that claiming to see Russia from your house there wouldn't seem so outlandish. Fewer than 100 people, mostly native Alaskans, live there year-round. The plant could shell crabs and gut salmon and pollock caught by Trident's ever-expanding fleet of catching boats.

Several years passed, but U.S. consumers still didn't quite cotton to pollock, recalls David Abbasian, the Akutan plant manager, speaking by phone. Attempting to convince a group of skeptical Long John Silver's executives to put pollock fillets on the chain's menu, Bundrant brought them to Akutan. Abbasian says the fast-food execs were so impressed by the taste of Trident's frozen product, they thought it was fresh. That day, he says, Trident signed a multimillion dollar contract to provide breaded, frozen whole pollock fillets to the chain. "That was the first big, big major contract to introduce pollock to the U.S. market," he says.

Consultant Steve Hughes says that before Trident started pushing the fish to restaurants and food wholesalers, things like fish 'n' chips or fish sandwiches were made with cod or whiting (also known as hake), both much less populous in the Pacific than pollock. When Bundrant convinced Long John Silver's executives that pollock could taste as good and cost less than the fish they used, an enormous domestic market opened up, making the "trash fish" suddenly valuable. Trident's business skyrocketed, and other suppliers benefited as well, as companies like McDonald's and Burger King started buying pollock for their fillets. Now pollock makes up the biggest share of the Alaskan fishing industry.

In the meantime, Bundrant received invaluable help in his empire-building from Congress, which started pushing for Americanization of the fishing industry in the mid-1970s. Brent Paine of United Catcher Boats says that back then, American fishers would look out from the docks in places like Dutch Harbor and see the lights of enormous foreign trawlers in the water.

Frustrated that foreign companies were making money from an American resource, domestic companies went to Congress and asked for legislation to give them first rights to fish in Alaskan waters. In 1976, Washington's long-serving senator Warren Magnuson and Alaska's senior senator Stevens sponsored a comprehensive bill that, among other things, pushed the boundary where foreign fishing boats could freely operate from 12 miles offshore to 200 miles. Foreign companies could still come closer, but first rights to fish within the 200-mile boundary went to American companies.

This act gave Trident an immediate leg up on the competition, as one of the few companies at the time actually pursuing the pollock caught by foreign companies. "Without that legislation, Trident would be a much different and smaller company because [the pollock industry] would be dominated by foreign fishing fleets," Plesha explains.

But the real gift to Trident came two decades later, when Stevens introduced the American Fisheries Act. At that time, Alaska's pollock-fishing waters had actually gotten crowded with boats, and the annual fish "derbies" were becoming dangerous for all parties.

Bundrant was using his processing factory at Akutan to handle some of the catch, while foreign-owned companies were using giant factory trawlers that could gut and freeze the fish on board, store them, and keep going—much as Bundrant had done with crab in his career's early years, but on a much larger scale. These factory trawlers were able to get around the 200-mile restriction as long as they were registered as a business in the U.S.—even if they were entirely owned by foreign citizens.

In 1998, Trident and other Alaskan fishers turned to Stevens for relief. Trident spent over $150,000 lobbying Congress that year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Bundrant and his wife had donated a total of $4,000 to Stevens for his re-election bid two years earlier.

Stevens' American Fisheries Act called for a reduction in the number of factory trawlers allowed in the Pacific, required 75 percent American ownership in companies operating out of Alaska, and created a quota system that gave individual fishing companies and smaller cooperatives allocations, rather than letting the factory trawlers scoop up everything they could. All of the measures benefited Trident.

Bundrant hired Joe Plesha as his bulldog in the fight, with the former Senate staffer testifying before committees he once worked with. Also pushing for the Act was an industry group, led by Trident, called the American Fisheries Act Coalition, or AFAC (which some in the industry referred to as All Fish Are Chuck's). Bundrant pitched the fight as a protection of American businesses. That wasn't entirely accurate. At the time, Arkansas-based Tyson Foods had a seafood arm operating offshore trawlers. Hoping to squeeze out some of their foreign competition, they backed Trident. The processors also formed their own lobbying group, the At-Sea Processors Association, enlisting help from local politicians like Ron Sims and Patty Murray.

The Act passed in October 1998 with a compromise that gave the trawlers a little more than they'd had under the original bill. But the Act still made Trident the biggest winner. The Akutan Catcher Vessel Association, a cooperative made up of Trident boats and boats selling their catch to Trident, walked away with more than 30 percent of the pollock not allocated to the trawlers—the most of any cooperative.