JUNEAU — After building a completely new plant just over two years ago, Alaska Glacier Seafoods is continuing its facility and product expansion to be part of what the Juneau-based, white-table-cloth processor sees as a steadily improving wild salmon market.
“It's night and day from what it was three or four years ago. There's so much more demand for the product,” said Mike Erickson, who owns and operates the plant with his son, Jim.
Closing in on its 20th year of operations, Alaska Glacier moved in 2005 from rented garage space in the capital city's Lemon Creek neighborhood to a 14,000-square-foot facility just north of the state ferry terminal on Auke Bay. This winter, the Ericksons upgraded their freezer capacity by 20,000 pounds per day, which Erickson expects to translate into a 60 to 70 percent increase in production capacity.
Alaska Glacier is also planning to bring in a floating processor to further increase production capacity that totaled close to 3 million pounds last year.
The physical plant expansion could mean an addition of a dozen workers to a summer staff of 50 to 70 employees, and more growth could be on the way if the salmon industry continues as the elder Erickson thinks it will.
“What we were five or six years ago and what we are now, what a change! You couldn't hardly give your fish away five years ago,” Erickson said. Alaska Glacier currently processes king and dungeness crab, halibut, black and true cod, sea cucumbers, red, silver, chum and king salmon, and salmon caviar. The admittedly optimistic Erickson is even thinking about expanding into pink salmon.
“All of a sudden it becomes very important to process every fish you can get your hands on,” he said in a May 24 interview.
Moving into pinks could extend his summer season by a month and requires no technical changes from late summer chum processing, but humpback salmon are a large-volume fish and Alaska Glacier is still limited by its freezer space. “It's a function of how much you want to spend on freezers that you use for basically six weeks a year,” he said. Alaska Glacier packs about 100,000 pounds of fish during those six weeks and the prospects for this summer's Southeast chum run could keep them more than full.
Last year's statewide chum harvest was 21 million. The Alaska Department of Fish is predicting returns of 24.8 million this year, including 15.7 million in Southeast.
Alaska Glacier is looking “closely” at expanding its dock, but the $300 to $400 per-square-foot cost is currently beyond financial reach and would only add to the freezer bottleneck. “When you do an expansion like that, you've got to create a vehicle to support that costing. We haven't quite been able to figure out how we can improve costing,” Erickson said.
Wild salmon is the leading candidate to give him the ride he is looking for. “A lot of people are pretty encouraged about what they're seeing in the salmon market,” he said.
A May visit by a group of Chinese buyers didn't produce any immediate sales, but those things always take time. “I haven't heard back from them yet. I'm sure we will,” Erickson said.
29,324 (in millions) 
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