Mark Whitham

Mark Whitham’s know-how is a sought-after commodity for small canners hoping to kick-start or upgrade their facilities. Coos Bay entrepreneur Mike Babcock isn’t the only one singing Whitham’s praises. Here’s what others are saying.

Fish to Soup

“When Mark came to the area, I sort of enlisted him to help with our processing records and update our cook times and scheduling,” says fisherman Mark Kujala, who runs his family’s cannery, Oregon Ocean Seafoods, in Warrenton. The family has canned salmon, tuna, and sturgeon under their brand, Skipanon, for nearly two decades. With Whitham’s input, Kujala soon will be releasing a new line of soups — old family recipes he’s keeping hush-hush for now. Whitham is also helping the company develop its own line of pouch-packed fish. “He’s very accessible,” says Kujala. “When I have questions in the middle of the day, I can call him up. Sometimes he’s out on the road, and he’ll pull over and take the time to listen and bounce off ideas.”

100 Diners

“Having Mark available has just been such an asset,” says Stan Eggas, owner of the Berry Patch Restaurant in Westport. “He has helped us come up with recipes and to start a processing and canning facility, which I frankly knew nothing about. It was just amazing.” Starting out as a tiny stand selling homemade jams, the business expanded to a restaurant that holds 100 diners. He also has been working with Whitham to develop a line of all-natural soups for high-end grocery stores. Eggas says Whitham helped him refine his recipes — chowders of salmon and razor clams, soups of tomato and chanterelle — to minimize preservatives and sodium and develop his canning process. “That OSU and Sea Grant have made this program and Mark available is really outstanding.”

Traditional Tribal Edibles

Jobs are sorely needed by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. “The unemployment rate on the reservation is really bad,” says Warm Springs elder Ron Supah. “The tribes need to seek opportunities to develop work for our tribal members.” Supah hopes to do that with a facility on the tribe’s reservation that will use retort pouches to preserve traditional foods such as elk, venison, berries and roots. Supah says the tribe is also considering packaging its sought-after Chinook salmon for sale in stores off the reservation.

Supah says the decision to use retort packaging came after he and other Warm Springs members visited Whitham at his Astoria lab. “We were pretty impressed by what we saw there,” remembers Supah. So far, Whitham has helped the tribe apply for a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant that will fund a feasibility study for the proposed facility.

Mike Babcock left a thriving lumber mill and set himself a new challenge: create a seafood business. (Photo: Pat Kight)

Still, in this one-time boomtown of lumber mills and commercial fishing, the entrepreneurial spirit lives. One man, Mike Babcock, is helping to kick-start Coos Bay’s renewal with an unlikely innovation: packing fish in pouches instead cans. Besides being flat and lightweight for cheaper, easier shipping, the laminated plastic-and-metal foil pouches are superior to cans in the No. 1 consumer yardstick: taste.

“Most store-bought tuna is twice cooked,” explains Babcock’s fish-packing guru, Mark Whitham, a food scientist with Oregon Sea Grant. “That means they cook all the nutrients and flavor out. Mike Babcock’s product is cooked only once, and it retains all the good fats, juices, and nutrients, and it tastes much better.”

It all began in 2010 when Babcock, a successful-but-restless sawmill owner, was looking for a new challenge. He heard about the packing pouches — called retortable or “retort” pouches in the industry — from coastal residents who had worked with Whitham on other projects. “I wonder if pouches would work for albacore?” he thought. To find out, he tracked down the food scientist, and together they investigated the pouch potential for Coos Bay. Within the year, Babcock had launched Oregon Seafoods.

The other "Bay Area." (Photo: Pat Kight)

Since October 2011 when he started shipping sustainably caught tuna and salmon under his label, Sea Fare Pacific, Babcock’s products have landed on the shelves of all eight Market of Choice grocery stores, as well as those of Portland’s trendy New Seasons Market for health-conscious shoppers. He also has created a line of smoked salmon for outdoor recreation giant REI, and his four flavors — sea salt, salt-free, smoked and jalapeno — have made their way to several other states.

From Freezer to Pouch

Just blocks from Coos Bay’s historic harbor, Babcock’s Oregon Seafoods plant is no bigger than a medium-sized classroom, but it’s packed to the gills with canning machinery. It’s cold inside. Workers wear hats and jackets under large, turquoise-colored aprons, latex gloves and hairnets as they pack fish for Sea Fare Pacific and several other brands.

“Of course, we would like to have more space,” says the 50-year-old businessman, a hairnet snugged over his red ball cap. “But we can do a lot with a small footprint.”

From the deep-freeze at Oregon Seafoods, workers carry salmon and albacore to the filleting room, where they slice up the fish and plop the chunks, red and raw, into small plastic cups. Two machines imported from Japan stand ready to package the fish into pouches. As the machine spins, another worker transfers chunks from the cups into 8-ounce pouches, which look like UPS envelopes, only silver.

The technical know-how behind Oregon Seafood’s processing, as well as the four specialty flavors developed for Sea Fare Pacific, came from Whitham. It was he who steered Babcock through his transition from mill owner to seafood processor. A soft-spoken, laid-back 57-year-old, Whitham is an unlikely revolutionary. Yet from his food lab at OSU Extension in Astoria, the Sea Grant scientist has been in the vanguard of Oregon’s canning coup.

If there’s such a thing as a food-preservation geek, Whitham is it. And if there’s one thing he “geeks out” about, it’s the flexible, lightweight retort pouches.

Oregon Seafoods workers load individual portions of cleaned and flavored albacore into pouches for sealing and cooking (Photo: Pat Kight)

“Retort pouches aren’t new,” says Whitham. “They’ve been around about 50 years, and, from what I’ve seen, they are really big in Europe and Asia. In general, they tend to be ahead of us as far as packaging is concerned.”

Coos Bay is just starting to catch up. The pouches’ advantages are many: lightweight and compact, they take less energy to ship than conventional steel cans. For the consumer or commercial chef, there’s no can to recycle. And their flat shape makes cooking more uniform. Again, it all comes down to flavor in the end.

Whitham’s larger mission — adding value to the region’s natural seafood bounty — underpins his 30-year career working with small producers up and down the coast. “Here in Oregon, seafood has really been a stand-alone product, and there’s just tremendous opportunity for adding value,” he says. With the right price point, package and recipe, processed fish can command double, triple, or even quadruple what it sells for raw. That in turn injects money and jobs into the community.

Injecting jobs and money into Coos Bay is exactly what Babcock is doing. A self-described “pedal-to-the-metal, get-it-done” type, the entrepreneur’s steely blue eyes are now focused on fine-tuning the process that took elbow grease and determination, along with Whitham’s expertise, to get moving. In Coos County where unemployment hovers around 10.5 percent — above average for both Oregon and the nation — the eight new jobs Babcock has created are a welcome boost.

From Cannery to Shopping Cart

On the cannery’s floor, the Japanese packing machines suck the air out of each pouch and seal it. Then comes the cooking. The oven — six feet around and15 feet tall with a massive metal door — looks more like a missile silo turned on its side than something from a commercial kitchen. It can hold a lot of product — more than 2,500 eight-ounce pouches, or nearly 475 pounds of fish. The pouches cook for 75 minutes at 240 degrees. Then they’re flash cooled to retain flavor.

In the cannery’s entryway, boxes full of packed tuna, ready to be shipped, testify that things are moving smoothly. But plenty of stumbling blocks stood in the way, Babcock attests. Whitham helped the entrepreneur persevere. “Whenever I have a problem,” he says, “I call him up and he’s there.”

Babcock isn’t sure why he left his successful business to start a new one in a field in which he had little experience. When urged to pin down a reason, he cites boredom. “The day-to-day operation of the sawmill was fine,” he recalls. “But we had been building the mill for a number of years, and once we got it built and we got to the monotonous day-to-day stuff, the challenge wasn’t there.”

The cannery lets him do what he loves best: build a business. These days, his schedule is full of food tradeshows. At first, he was skeptical about pitching his fish at the crowded tradeshow scene. But his first show was a total success, generating hundreds of sales leads.

That tradeshow, incidentally, was in San Francisco — the other “bay area.” Driving home, Babcock was elated — so elated, in fact, he just couldn’t wait to make another sale. So he stopped at a small health-food store in Eureka, California, and won yet another customer.

“Everywhere I go, people who try our product, they just fall all over it, they just love the quality, like they never tasted fish like this before,” he says. For that, and for the jobs he created in Coos Bay, Babcock credits Mark Whitham and Oregon Sea Grant. “This product has Mark’s name all over it. I want to keep this relationship going.”

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Editor’s note: In March 2013, Oregon Seafoods announced that with help from Mark Whitham, the company launched a new line of soups and sauces (Seafood Bisque, Smoked Salmon Chowder, three albacore curries and a West Coast Ciopinno). Improved labeling also noted sustainability qualities such as Dolphin Safe and Line Caught. The company’s products are in more than 500 retail outlets.

"Fishermen are an extremely curious group. That's their nature. And they have a hell of a lot of knowledge," says Jeff Feldner (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Fishing is hard enough. The weather, changing ocean conditions and the fickleness of fish make it tough to track your quarry let alone catch them. Now competition for space in the ocean — an oxymoron in an environment defined by its seemingly limitless expanse — poses new concerns along the West Coast. In the future, fishermen will jostle with wave energy parks, marine reserves and aquaculture for space to troll for shrimp, drop crab pots or cast lines for rockfish.

Jeff Feldner knows what’s at stake: individual livelihoods, coastal communities and the resources that support them. The Newport-based Oregon Sea Grant Extension educator bought his first fishing boat in 1973. A few years earlier, on the lookout for a career change (he has a chemical engineering degree from the University of Minnesota), he had come to Newport at the invitation of a salmon fisherman. After a day at sea, he was hooked. “I‘ve been fishing forever,” he says, as though life began the moment he crossed the Yaquina River Bar into the Pacific.

Feldner still fishes part-time, processes his catch in a cooperatively owned South Beach packing plant and tests consumer response to new marketing methods (see how researchers are creating the basis for a sustainable seafood industry at Pacific Fish Trax). He has always kept an eye on the bigger issues that define the industry. Tensions over gear restrictions, by-catch (the non-targeted fish that come up in nets) and closed seasons drove him to serve a nine-year stint on the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission. Now, he is one of 15 Sea Grant specialists and educators from Brookings to Astoria, who work with individuals and with community organizations to address coastal issues through dialog and collaborative science.

“We are the go-between between the seafood industry and fishery science or fishery management,” says Feldner. He and his Sea Grant colleagues Kaety Hildenbrand, Flaxen Conway, Jamie Doyle and others help community groups participate in decision-making processes on topics such as marine reserves and wave energy. In 2010, they helped facilitate a conference among scientists and the fishing industry on another contentious topic, off-shore aquaculture. They are addressing invasive species that upset coastal ecosystems and hazards such as eroding shorelines and tsunami risks.

“Sea Grant Extension distinguishes itself in public engagement,” says Dave Hansen, Extension program leader based in Corvallis. “The marine reserves process is a good example, where, in a pretty hot political and emotional situation, we tried to be the convener that everybody could trust, that didn’t have a secret agenda.”

In 2008, Feldner and former Sea Grant Extension agent Ginny Goblirsch coordinated a series of eight coast-wide “listening and learning” sessions on marine reserves. “When the process ended, the governor changed course,” says Feldner, “slowed down the process,  basically said it was going to take at least another two years, and put in place a process to ensure more community based input – essentially moving more toward a bottom-up process rather than a top-down one.”

Oregon’s tradition of strong community participation in resource management has drawn national attention, says Hansen, who came to Sea Grant in 2010 from Delaware. “There is a tremendous amount of community interest in decisions here. Nothing just slides through,” he adds. “People seem to have their fingers on the pulse of what’s going on.”

And new developments in science and technology will continue to fuel that interest. Tomorrow’s fishermen will have access to more accurate information about fish stocks, ocean conditions and markets, says Feldner. They’ll be able to harvest more efficiently, protect threatened species and offer consumers a high-quality local product at the same time. “There’s nothing static in fishing,” he says.

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For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

Partnering with coastal communities in support of Oregon's vital seafood industry brings Professor Gil Sylvia in close contact with fishermen and other stakeholders (Photo: Don Frank)

Gilbert “Gil” Sylvia spent childhood summers riding a bus through the lake-studded military base where he lived, hauling buckets of live fish from pond to pond. He and his buddies were trying to alter the balance of species for one reason: to boost their own catches. They never guessed that by dumping sunfish, bass and catfish into the Army’s carefully managed trout ponds, they were making a mess of fisheries management. The clean-up cost thousands, he learned later.

“I’m still trying to make up for it,” laughs Sylvia, a professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University.

Today, he has decades of experience in science and economics to back up his efforts. As superintendent of OSU’s Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station (COMES) — the largest such station in the United States — Sylvia oversees research and outreach in ocean resource science, management, policy and marketing. Along with 20 faculty and staff members and several dozen graduate students located at the Hatfield Marine Science Center and the Astoria Seafood Laboratory, his collaborators include the Oregon Seafood Commodity Commissions, the Community Seafood Initiative and various industry groups, as well as state and federal agencies. Key research areas include aquaculture, fisheries science, fishery management, fishery ecology, marine mammals, marine economics and marketing, marine fisheries genetics, and seafood science and engineering. According to the Oregon Invests database, COMES programs generated more than $12 million in economic impacts in 2008 and 2009 and produced an equivalent of 30 to 40 new jobs for Oregon and Pacific Northwest coastal communities.

Terra writer Lee Sherman recently sat down with Sylvia in his Newport office to get an overview of COMES and its impact on Oregon coastal economies and communities.

Terra:    What defines the marine experiment station?

Sylvia:    The station is unique because it’s highly interdisciplinary. We have many disciplines, from seafood marketing to technology to ecology to genetics, economics, aquaculture, all in the same group.  And therefore, we can really tackle things.  When we sit down with communities, we’ve got all the different perspectives. I think it’s a huge advantage.

Terra:    What’s the key to bringing the university and the fishing community together?

Sylvia:    The key is trust. They have to trust you to be honest and objective, not to have agendas.

Terra:    How do you develop that trust?

Sylvia:    We create a table for scientific discussion and ideas, get people to talk about those ideas, brainstorm them, and put a teams together that aren’t just traditional scientists — teams that include members of the community, the industry — to tackle the problem or seize the opportunity. I don’t think it’s well understood just how tough our fishery laws are, how many challenging goals have been set into law, particularly over the last decade, for managing and conserving every single stock of fish. For example, at any given time there may be 50 salmon stocks found off the Oregon coast. There are at least 60 stocks in the ground-fish fishery. So you are managing hundreds of species and stocks. Each one has to be conserved at a level equal to or above a stock level that maximizes biological yield. Without really good science, we won’t be able to do it successfully because the challenges are so difficult. You have to bring everyone to the table to figure this out.

Terra:    Did we learn things during the spotted owl wars in the ‘80s that are helping inform the current discussion about marine reserves?

Sylvia:    Clearly, the terrestrial wars — in terms of using space, creating corridors and linkages, and conserving biodiversity on the landscape — are having a great deal of influence on thinking about the design of the reserves. The linkages may not be exactly the same because you’re dealing with a three-dimensional environment in the ocean.  But the idea is that one area may be a good spawning ground, another area may be the settlement ground. You’re trying to accommodate the different life histories and connect them spatially. We’re moving through a new era of spatial management in the oceans.  Thirty years ago the fishing industry could go just about wherever they wanted to go, fish where they wanted to go. Today, if I drew you a fishing map of the ocean and showed you all the rules about spatial use, just for fishing, you’d have a hard time reading the map. Now you’ve got marine reserves, wave energy, wind energy. And so you have traditional uses clashing with new uses just like in the terrestrial landscape. In some ways it’s not that different.

Terra:  Aquaculture is another potential user of ocean space.

Sylvia:    Yes, but not at the same rate. That’s because offshore aquaculture is really quite difficult to do, particularly in our dynamic environment on the West Coast.  But we’re just about at the limits of what we can generate from ocean resources.  The world, collectively, might be able to produce another 30 percent with really smart management of fishing resources. But it’s still going to be capped by the natural productivity of the oceans. So the only way to get more seafood is from aquaculture. But how do you accommodate aquaculture, given concerns about space, disease transfer or effluent? All those things have to be considered and thought about to accommodate it in smart ways.

Terra:    Where does Oregon stand on offshore aquaculture?

Sylvia:     Oregon has been particularly sensitive about offshore aquaculture. The federal government made an effort to develop enabling legislation to support offshore aquaculture about five years ago. But I don’t think the National Marine Fisheries Service really went around and had conversations with a lot of the states.  So the states’ reactions, and Oregon’s in particular, was, “Is this going to have a negative influence on our oceans, our fishing industry?” Politics and peoples’ visceral reactions got ahead of it. The Legislature wrote a statement saying that they were very concerned about offshore aquaculture in their state waters and basically took an anti-aquaculture position.

Terra:    What was OSU’s stance?

Sylvia:    In response to that, the leadership right here at the Marine Experiment Station, Chris Langdon in particular, pulled together an offshore aquaculture conference to try to get an honest discussion going about all the views and to bring experts from around the United States to the table.  We had about a 130 people participate right here at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. It was an excellent conference. We had offshore aquaculturists, many of whom are former commercial fishermen, talking face-to-face with Oregon fishermen. My own view is, if you want to build on your fishery industry, your seafood industry, you have to consider aquaculture. But you also have to think about impacts. “Zero impacts” is a big value today. But you can’t use the ocean without some impact. The question is, what’s the standard?  Is it zero impacts or reasonable impacts? What are reasonable tradeoffs between the different uses in the ocean? How do we measure those impacts and tradeoffs?  At what point do they become damaging? I think the university has a very big job in leading those debates and bringing people to the table, having an open, honest conversation, hitting all the issues, and searching for solutions.

Terra:    As a marine economist, a lot of what you do is “bioeconomic modeling”?  What is it?

Sylvia:    The bioeconomic model merges two types of models — biological models and economic models. Biological models help us understand species or ecosystem behavior. Economic models try to replicate our economy, maybe on a micro level, maybe on a macro level, and try to figure out what happens if people behave a certain way in response to various rules, constraints and incentives. What happens to prices?  Supplies? Jobs? In fisheries, it’s both the biological species and man’s behavior interacting.  How do humans impact the resource?  If we fish hard today, what happens to the biological population tomorrow? It’s a very powerful tool for exploring how you optimally manage.  You can’t figure out fishery or aquaculture management without doing bioeconomic modeling.

Terra:    How do isotopic signatures of salmon help us manage the fishery?

Sylvia:    Jessica Miller on our faculty is a national expert in this area, looking at the ear bones of fish, which contain chemical “signatures” in the form of isotopic ratios. Those signatures, those minerals that are laid down as ratios, will tell you the animal’s age and where it’s been—its life history. How long did a salmon smolt stay in a river?  Did it leave early or late? That may be very important when you have dams releasing water. Did it go into the ocean too early?  Did it do well there? Or did it die there because it was flushed out of the system too early or too late? Where did it go in the ocean? We’re also using the ear bone to do to a project in the Columbia River, going through Indian middens to try to track the history of salmon.

Terra:    Do those isotopic signatures help with salmon management issues now?

Sylvia:    Yes, exactly. We’re trying to connect life history with salmon behavior and management of watersheds and fisheries. How can we use that knowledge in good management?

Terra:    What is the status of your pilot project tracking local fish origins with bar codes?

Sylvia:    We developed a Web tool called Pacific Fish Tracks, which we used for marketing seafood, including salmon and albacore. A consumer at New Seasons markets, which specialize in high-quality local foods, could go in and pick up a piece of fish, scan a bar code, and view a video clip telling the story of the fish product he or she was buying — the story of the fisherman who caught it, where it was caught, who processed it. We’re hoping to have some meetings this winter with New Seasons about the next stage. They’d like to brand four or five products with Pacific Fish Tracks labels. And we’ve continued to build it out. We’re talking with at least three other fisheries on the Atlantic Coast, in the Gulf, and in British Columbia.  We’re hoping to do projects not just in Oregon and on the West Coast, but around the United States, using this tool.

Terra:   The concept sounds similar to Country Natural Beef, where ranchers go into stores to show consumers where the meat comes from — trying to connect the grower to the product.

Sylvia:    Exactly. Tools like Fish Tracks help build the sustainability story. People want to know the food they’re eating is safe, high-quality, sustainable and, in many cases, local. Our concept, our vision is that the fisherman, the manager, the scientist, the retailer, the consumer are all part of the greater seafood community.  And we’re trying to connect them all through portals on the website. So while we’re using rigorous science and objective information, we’re also trying to convey information and connect people. I think it’s a good example of how you really tackle ecosystem-based approaches to science and management and involve the community. I’m hoping one day we’ll have a K-12 portal for high school teachers, too.

Terra:    Pacific whiting was your first big success as superintendent.

Sylvia:    I hadn’t been here more than a week when a fisherman came up to me and said, “Oh, you’re that new guy that was hired by the university.” We started talking, had a couple of beers. And then he goes: “You know, I’ve got to tell you something. You’re here for one reason and one reason only: whiting.” And I said, “What’s a whiting?” I spent the next 10, 12 years of my life on it. Probably half of my work was just Pacific whiting, every part of it, from quality to marketing to bioeconomic modeling. It’s now Oregon’s largest fishery, by volume. It’s used to make a variety of seafood products, including surimi — a fish product that can mimic crab legs or other seafood products. In fact, one of our faculty, Jae Park, is an international leader in surimi research and education. That is exactly the kind of project we can conduct in Oregon, with industry, state and university partners all together at the table: intelligent discussions, smart approaches and, well, here we are.

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For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.