Trident Seafoods operates the largest seafood processing facility in North America on Akutan Island, one of the Krenitzen Islands in the Fox Island group of the Eastern Aleutians, about 750 miles (1210 km) southwest of Anchorage and 36 miles (58 km) northeast of Dutch Harbor, Alaska. In 2023, the company announced a major restructuring, and plans to replace its aging seafood-processing plant in Akutan, Alaska with a new facility to be built at Captains Bay on Unalaska Island. Trident Seafoods is based in Seattle, Washington and manages a fleet of fishing vessels and processing plants across several locations in Alaska and has an international distribution network that markets frozen, canned, smoked, and ready-to-eat products. Its remote location on Akutan Island was chosen for access to lucrative Bering Sea fishing grounds and the Alaska Native village of Akutan. The plant operates year-round, housing more than 1,400 workers during peak season and processing over 3 million pounds of raw fish daily. Alaska pollock—the most abundant Bering Sea whitefish—is its primary catch, although the facility also processes Pacific cod, Alaska king and snow crab, and halibut. It produces surimi and secondary products such as pollock roe, fishmeal, and fish oil. Historically, the Aleut Unangan people inhabited Siskena, a village at the northeast corner of Akutan Harbor. Unangan men hunted seals, whales, sea lions, sea otters, and occasionally walruses from baidarkas, while women gathered fish, birds, eggs, wild plants, and shellfish, as well as berries, roots, and grasses for basket weaving. The Russian maritime fur trade brought significant displacements and cultural change. In 1878 the Western Fur & Trading Company established a trading post at present-day Akutan, where a Russian Orthodox church and school soon followed. Residents of Siskena and villages on nearby Akun Island then relocated to Akutan. The Unangan primarily fished for salmon, herring, halibut, rockfish, Pacific cod, eulachon, catching pollock only incidentally.

Between 1929 and 1931, Japan deployed a fishing trawler to explore the eastern Bering Sea’s resources, including pollock and yellowfin sole. In 1933 the Japanese government sponsored a commercial pollock-harvesting venture to earn foreign currency, and fishing continued through 1937 with a fleet comprising a mothership, three to five catcher‐trawlers and up to eight paired trawlers. In 1940 Japan resumed pollock fishing to bolster domestic supplies amid its war with China, and in 1954 targeted yellowfin sole, Pacific ocean perch and king crab. In the late 1950s the Soviet Union sent fleets of factory trawlers to the eastern Bering Sea. Each fleet included several motherships escorted by paired trawlers that delivered fish for processing, supported by refrigeration vessels. As yellowfin sole and Pacific ocean perch became overfished, Japan shifted its focus to pollock, prized for high‐quality surimi. Pollock’s abundance and texture made it ideal for surimi production, reinforcing Japan’s reliance on this species. By 1979 Japan operated 150 land‐based surimi plants and over 3,000 processing facilities. Economies of scale from large factory trawlers spurred rapid fleet expansion—from four in 1964 to 42 in 1972—establishing Japan as a pioneer in the pollock fishery. At that time, US territorial waters extended only 3 nautical miles. In the 1970s, concerns over depleting Pacific resources spurred calls for expanded boundaries. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska championed extending US jurisdiction to 12 miles offshore plus a 200‐mile exclusive economic zone, a proposal supported by Senator Warren Magnuson. With foreign fleets harvesting billions of pounds of fish in the eastern Bering Sea, domestic fishermen lobbied for broader access. In 1976 the Fishery Conservation and Management Act established a 200‐mile conservation zone, revitalized the US fishing industry and created eight regional fishery management councils—including Alaska’s North Pacific Fishery Management Council—to oversee all coastal natural resources, from fish to oil and minerals. These legislative measures redefined US fisheries management, curtailed foreign overexploitation and balanced conservation with the need to sustain a vital industry.

Agreements were reached with Taiwan and the Soviet Union in 1976 and with Japan, Korea, and Poland in 1977, allowing those fleets to continue fishing while the US fleet and industry were revitalized. Instead of switching to pollock and other low‐value species in unfamiliar international markets, domestic fishermen focused on crab and other high‐value fisheries with established domestic markets. US fishermen were unaccustomed to trawling for pollock and most groundfish. This period marked a critical transition for the domestic fishing industry. To expand fisheries in the eastern Bering Sea and beyond, a policy encouraged foreign nations to help develop the US seafood industry by purchasing fish harvested by US-flagged vessels through joint ventures and investing in shore-based processing facilities. In 1981, Chuck Bundrant built a processing plant on Akutan Island on land leased from the village of Akutan—a federally recognized tribe under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. In 1992, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council created the Western Alaska Community Development Quota Program to allow western Alaska communities to participate in Bering Sea fisheries that had been inaccessible due to high capital requirements. The program allocates a percentage of all Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands quotas for groundfish, halibut, and crab to eligible communities. Its objectives are to enable villages to invest in fisheries, support economic development, alleviate poverty, and foster sustainable, diversified local economies. In 1996, the village of Akutan was added to the eligible communities. In 1998, the American Fisheries Act mandated a reduction in factory trawlers in the Pacific, required 75 percent American ownership in companies operating from Alaska, and established a quota system that allocated portions of the catch to individual fishing companies and smaller cooperatives. The Akutan Catcher Vessel Association—a cooperative of Trident boats and vessels selling their catch to Trident—was allocated more than 30 percent of the pollock not assigned to trawlers. In 2023, the rising cost of operating a remote facility on Akutan, particularly with increasing costs of power generation and logistics, forced Trident to reconsider renovation of the aging plant. Read more here and here. Explore more of the Trident Seafoods and Akutan here: