Chuck Bundrant, the titan of the fishing business who commercialized pollock at quick meals chains world wide and spent six a long time trawling northern seas, died on Sunday on the age of 79.
Bundrant quietly ran America’s largest seafood firm, Trident Seafoods, from Seattle, with a fleet of 40 vessels and 16 processing crops, primarily within the Pacific Northwest. Trident Seafoods has grown to make use of some 5,000 throughout peak season in Alaska. Forbes estimates gross sales of the intently held non-public firm at roughly $2 billion. Bundrant, who fought Parkinson’s illness for the previous decade, had a fortune price a minimum of $1.3 billion when he died, Forbes estimates.
Bundrant, who was born in Tennessee, began fishing Alaskan waters in 1961. That’s when he left faculty after one semester and drove a 1953 Ford station wagon with three buddies from Center State Tennessee College to Seattle, arriving with $80 in his pocket. Having grown up desirous to be a veterinarian, the 19-year-old discovered himself falling in love with the docks whereas working for a fish processor. As a substitute of going again to high school, he made his technique to Alaska by winter, the place he labored on a industrial crabbing boat. He finally grew to become captain of the ship.
In 1973, Bundrant cofounded Trident Seafoods with two crab fishermen in Alaska. They created the 135-foot Bilikin, the primary fishing boat with on-board crab cookers and freezing tools. By the Eighties, competitors for sure fish peaked.
Alaskan pollock, a bottom-feeder that cooks thought of a so-called trash fish, grew to become Bundrant’s goldmine. His first break got here when the Lengthy John Silver’s signed a multi million-dollar deal in 1981. That very same yr, Trident constructed a fish-processing plant in Akutan, Alaska, what grew to become it’s outer-most operations. Trident then grew to become the principle provider to nationwide quick meals chains, together with McDonald’s and Burger King, as a result of Bundrant offered pollock cheaper than the cod they have been used to purchasing.
Bundrant additionally performed politics to his benefit over the a long time. In 1998 Trident and different fishing firms pushed Congress to move a invoice that restricted overseas fishing outfits from working in U.S. waters by requiring 75% American possession for firms fishing within the Pacific Ocean inside 200 miles offshore. Bundrant was one of many invoice’s architects.
“Chuck noticed all these overseas fishing companies and stated ‘I desire a piece of that’ on the time when nobody was these fisheries,” remembers Brent Paine, the chief director of commerce group United Catcher Boats who has fished in Alaska and lobbied for the business for many years alongside Bundrant.
The ensuing political spectacle noticed Stevens, who was chair of the appropriations committee on the time, decommission round a dozen offshore trawler boats owned by overseas firms and stripped them on the shipyards. In line with Paine, Bundrant’s “pipeline to those key staffers” on Capitol Hill even led Stevens to earmark $3.5 million for an airport constructed on Akutan Island, in order that seasonal Trident staff might fly nearer to the plant the place they work, as an alternative of getting to take an hours-long ferry experience. It opened in 2012 at a price to the federal government of $54 million.
The subsequent yr, in 2013, Bundrant’s son Joe took over as CEO. Along with Joe, Bundrant is survived by his spouse, Diane, daughter Jill Dulcich, daughter Julie Bundrant Rhodes, and their households, together with 13 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.
“This firm, it doesn’t matter what measurement it’s, it’s going to nonetheless be an in depth household,” Bundrant once said. “That’s the key to Trident’s success.”
