COLUMBIA/PACIFIC – Do you have a new idea for a healthy tuna burger that could be sold in grocery freezers around the country? Think the packaging of your company’s canned salmon could use a bit of a makeover? Or perhaps you and your business partner have aspirations to market Dungeness crab puffs.

Help might just be found in the Community Seafood Initiative. The initiative, a joint venture between Oregon State University’s Seafood Consumer Center and Seafood Laboratory and Ilwaco-based ShoreBank Enterprise Pacific, now has a new home at the Seafood Center, a new program leader, and a new, streamlined process for helping Northwest businesses bring their seafood-related ideas to market.

“We’re putting together a full-service team,” said Diane Moody, the initiative’s program leader, who added that she wants the program to become a “one-stop shop” for seafood entrepreneurs. “The program needed a presence and a place for people to come to, and there’s no better place than the Seafood Center for this initiative.”

The Community Seafood Initiative started in 2002 with grants from the Kellogg Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Funds for Rural America, with the intent to find new markets and product opportunities for the seafood industry. For the past few years, businesses have gone to the participants in the initiative for help with various aspects of product development and testing and financing.

Oyster innovationThe initiative helped Dave Nisbet of Nisbet Oyster Company, which sells Goose Point Oysters, develop different ways to sell oysters.

“They kind of help you jump start and see what it is you need” for product development, Nisbet said. “It takes some meshing gears of different experts to get things off the ground.” After receiving guidance from people involved in the initiative, he sells oyster shooters packaged with salsa or sauce in a shot glass, as well as high-pressure treated oysters that come pre-shucked, but still in the shell.

“Any seafood company can walk in and say I have an idea, but how do I get down the product development pathway,” he said. “They help formulate that idea into something concrete that you can analyze.” He added, though, that not having the Community Seafood Initiative in one particular place “makes it very hard for user groups to know where to come in.”

Now, however, the program is centralized at the Seafood Center’s office on Marine Drive in Astoria, and there is a formal process for the progression from idea to market. Entrepreneurs can fill out a two-page questionnaire about their idea. If it’s a good fit for the initiative, the partners will assemble a core team of experts from applicable fields. This includes people from the initiative’s partners, as well as consultants with packaging and marketing expertise.

“We’ve really designed this product development service and pathway to be flexible enough to handle a lot of needs,” Moody said. Moody worked at ShoreBank Enterprises as its markets and information director for nine years, and although she still works for the organization, she moved to the Seafood Center in October to spearhead the new Community Seafood Initiative developments.

“This development at the seafood center really represents for us a formalization from collaboration to a permanent institution that combines community-based science at the highest levels with product development and marketing expertise and capital investment,” said John Berdes, managing director of ShoreBank Enterprise Pacific. “Those are the three main ingredients to finding the maximum potential value from our natural resources.”

And that is where the different expertises of the initiative’s partners come into play.

In addition to serving as the program’s home, the Seafood Consumer Center focuses on product development and marketing. It hosts conferences and workshops that highlight types of seafood. For example, last year people from various sectors of the industry gathered to talk about sardines, and how this plentiful fish can overcome a negative image to become something that Americans will want to eat.

This year, it will host a conference for owners of micro-canneries, which will include seminars in areas such as micro-canning technologies and tuna biology and regulatory issues. It will also sponsor a culinology workshop, an “Iron Chef”-like event in which Seafood Center Chef Eric Jenkins, recipe developers, food technicians, seafood buyers, marketers, and others involved in the industry will spend the day in the kitchen thinking up new ways to use a particular kind of seafood. At the end of the day, organizers hope to have 20 to 30 ideas.

“It’s an opportunity and a forum for those in the industry to come together with new ideas,” said Moody. The center hosted a similar workshop five years ago, but hopes to make it an annual event.

Technical help Once an idea is generated, scientists at OSU’s Seafood Laboratory can use their expertise to make it better.

“We’re more of the technical arm of that process,” said Michael Morrissey, director of the Seafood Lab. Researchers can design ways to extend the shelf life of a product, or reduce the bacterial count, such as the high-pressure processing method they used with Nisbet’s oysters.

“As new technology rolls out in food science, trying to incorporate these new technologies into value-added products is a role the Seafood Lab plays,” Morrissey said. He added that, as a science-based institution that has been working with the seafood industry for 60 years, the Seafood Lab brings additional credibility to the seafood initiative.

Bringing in financial advice to the process is ShoreBank Enterprise Pacific. As entrepreneurs consult with the core team about the development or improvement of a product, they are also in discussions with ShoreBank about how to pay for the venture. If ShoreBank officials think the project has marketplace potential, they can support entrepreneurs with a product innovation fund, Berdes said, which allows ShoreBank to make capital investments that match the innovators start-up money.

ShoreBank looks for entrepreneurs who have management capacity, good financial credibility, an understanding of the market opportunities as well as the species they’re working with, prior experience with innovations, and a “proven ability to do what they say they’re going to do,” Berdes said.

However, he added that “no one ever meets all of those things; that’s where our ability to provide assistance comes in.”

Casting the net wideThose involved with the initiative said that they hope to help with a variety of projects, but are focused on new or improved products for albacore tuna, shellfish and sardines. Of special interest are projects in which the producer wants to use a previously underused part of the species, or do something to make the product more valuable. This could be anything from processing a tuna on a boat in a special way so that it can be sold as sushi, to packaging oysters in a shooter glass.

“Through this collaboration, we want to help coastal communities do more with less,” Berdes said. “Hence, new products, new markets, so that a diminished harvest does not translate to diminished quality of life or economy.”

This goal is apparent to those they help. “I think you have a group of people here who truly want to see small communities flourish, and the seafood industry in those small communities flourish,” Nisbet said. “I think that comes across very strongly.”