The offer was too good for the Food Bank of Central New York to pass up. A local fish farm was going out of business, and it wanted to donate more than 40,000 pounds of sushi-grade salmon.
There was one big hitch: All that free salmon was in the form of 13,312 live fish.
Like any good fish story, the saga of the salmon — from a high-end fish-farm start-up with clients like Nobu and FreshDirect to the plates of needy New Yorkers — soon swelled into an epic tale. It came to involve dozens of volunteer fish-catchers, members of the Onondaga Nation and a guy willing to donate 10,000 bags of ice.
It began with bad news: LocalCoho, a salmon farming operation that was considered exemplary because of its sustainable practices when it opened in 2017, was shutting down on Jan. 31. The company, based in Auburn, N.Y., had drawn praise for aquaculture that raised salmon in tanks on land, sparing the environment from pollutants inherent in ocean-based fish farming. But despite being well-received and seeming to have regular investment, LocalCoho struggled to make a profit, according to an article in Syracuse.com, which first reported the full story of the fish donation.
Early on Jan. 2, Meghan Durso, a manager at TDO, a Syracuse nonprofit, took a frantic phone call from LocalCoho’s owner, Andre Bravo, about what to do with all his fancy fish. He was prepared to give the salmon away, but he didn’t know where to start.
“He said, ‘Hey, we are going to throw these in the dumpster,’” Ms. Durso recalled. “And I said: ‘Hey, wait.’”
But the task facing her team was giant. They found takers for tons of live fish — including the Food Bank of Central New York and the Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance — but that was just the beginning. They would also need people to scoop each of the thousands of salmon from their tanks in Auburn, people to ship them on ice to a processor and people to turn the fish into fillets. And they had only days to do it before LocalCoho closed for good.
Calls and emails to Mr. Bravo from The Times were not returned. Reached by phone, Adam Kramarsyck, a manager for LocalCoho, said he was not permitted by the company to comment.
Then the iceman came: Shawn Salle, the operations manager of Brown Carbonic, a Syracuse business that runs the Ice Company of Elmira, answered the call. His grandparents, who founded the company, long supported the food bank, Mr. Salle said, so his response was easy: Where should he send his freezer trucks?
Ultimately Mr. Salle supplied five employees, two trucks and 10,000 pounds of ice to the project, at no charge. “It really wasn’t a question of if we will,” he said. “It was, How can we help and what do you need?”
Back at the Central New York Food Bank, Andrew Katzer, the director of procurement, was also busy working the phones. He was delighted to take the fish, but he would need to find a company that could clean, gut and debone more than 20 tons of salmon. There was also the matter of drumming up volunteers. Ultimately 42 helpers would spend the week in LocalCoho’s tanks, wearing rubber waders and netting the fish, placing them in ice baths and loading the cold, slippery creatures into the refrigerated trucks.
Mr. Katzer was right there with the volunteers in the tanks. “The fish, they often don’t want to be caught,” he said. “You get very wet.”
JD & Sons Seafood, a Rochester wholesaler, offered to fillet the fish at a steep discount, Mr. Katzer said. The last of the fish left for Rochester on Wednesday; the next step will be distributing the fillets to the food bank’s partner organizations — more than 300 across 11 New York counties. The total operation has cost about $30,000, according to the bank. Until recently, Local Coho salmon went for $17.99 a pound on the Fresh Direct website, making the approximate market value of the donation more than $700,000.
About 250 salmon were picked up by members of the Onondaga Nation, who filled two pickup trucks with coolers to take to their land, on a day so cold the fish stayed frozen solid, said Curtis Waterman, a member of the Beaver Clan who works as a hunter-gatherer fisherman for the Onondaga Nation Farm, about 20 miles south of Syracuse.
There, before filleting the salmon, Mr. Waterman and his colleagues gave the animals a traditional thank you for their sacrifice in the Onondaga language, he said. Then the fish was flavored in a slightly less traditional manner, with teriyaki, brown sugar, salt and pepper, and then smoked, before the about 9,000 servings of salmon were packaged to be given away to the nation.
“I’ve had a lot of smoked salmon,” Mr. Waterman said. “This was good.”
