Supreme Alaska Seafoods: in a hurry to take a little fish to a big market.

• Author: Reid, Sean
• Position: The New 49ers - Company Profile

In the world of production automobiles, 0 to 60 in seven seconds is pretty good time. In Alaska business, $0 to $2.5 million is pretty good for first year revenue numbers, right? Especially if you were in business only about half of the year. Well, how about from $2.5 million in your first year to $32.5 million in your second?

You couldn't blame somebody with those kinds of numbers for being just a bit boastful; but, to hear president Jim Salisbury do the revenue numbers for his Supreme Alaska Seafoods, you'd think he almost had something for which to apologize. "Well, it's a little difficult to compare your success to anything when you're starting from nothing, so you have to keep the figures in perspective."

Perhaps that's just modesty, but you can't argue with those numbers that rank the fledgling Anchorage-based company in the state's business league with some pretty high-profile members including Reeve Aleutian Airways, Usibelli Coal Mine and Hickel Investment Co. Salisbury has taken the company through the turbulent waters of high-seas fishing to become one of the key players in the international surimi market. Like most success stories, it was a combination of skill, timing and politics that made this fish story come up roses. First it was politics.

Political events, which gave rise to the national Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1977, set the stage for some new American entrepreneurialism while reshaping Alaska's offshore fleet. Gradually, foreign fishing fleets and offshore processors were excluded from water 3 to 200 miles offshore. By the late 1980s foreign ships participated only as minority partners in processing operations. For the Japanese, long a force in the Dutch Harbor-based Bering Sea bottom fishery, the new alliances offered continued financial rewards as well as secure sources of Alaskan pollock. The Japanese had come to depend on that pollock for the manufacture of the protein-rich fish paste, known as surimi, which frequently ends up as little processed fish cakes and imitation crab legs in a billion-dollar industry.

International Partnership

One of those new Japanese-American pollock partnerships spawned Supreme Alaska Seafoods with former Homer resident Bill Phillips, once an aide to Sen. Ted Stevens, and now an attorney in Washington, D.C., as one of the three founders. Credited by Salisbury as the "concept man," Phillips wanted to make the new company as Alaskan as possible, with operations...