Profiles

Cassandra Wright

Cassandra Wright is the co-owner of Vis Seafoods, a retail and wholesale seafood market in Bellingham, Washington. Vis Seafoods was one of the early purveyors of exclusively wild, sustainable seafood – their policy from the beginning has been non-farmed, non-endangered seafood items.

What is your favorite seafood to eat?
It’s a toss-up between line-caught lingcod and line-caught king salmon.

What is your favorite seafood to prepare?
Both line-caught lingcod and line-caught king salmon.

What’s the most popular seafood that you sell at Vis Seafoods?
Hook-and-line-caught king salmon; crab meat is also popular.

How did you get interested in the issue of sustainable seafood?
I grew up in a commercial fishing background here in Washington and Alaska. So it’s always been in the forefront of our thinking; our livelihood depended on sustainability. When we started our market, our main goal was to provide wild, sustainably harvested ocean-caught seafood.

How would you describe your philosophy on ocean conservation?
I see it as a bigger issue than just having to do with fishermen and fishing. For me, it involves what happens with logging in the mountains to everything that happens along a river all the way to how fisheries are managed among sport, commercial, native and non-native. Whatever happens with ocean conservation is affected by everybody. Everybody has an impact; you can’t just solve it by removing fishermen. It’s not that simple.

How has your philosophy changed what fish you sell?
We have always only sold sustainable seafood. When we opened our market in 1996, we carried Chilean sea bass, for example. But once the information, research, and media coverage came out about the issue, I stopped carrying it. It wasn’t worth it; sable fish is an excellent alternative that wasn’t even being used yet. You just have to keep reading and educating yourself to keep up with it.

Have your customers noticed?
When we opened, farmed salmon was all you could see in the grocery stores, and it wasn’t labeled or marked as a farmed product. When we started, people didn’t know there was a difference between wild and farmed salmon. We educated customers and over time, with all the media coverage, it made the job a little easier. Now, people request wild fish more often than they ask for farmed fish. It’s starting to filter to through people’s minds, at least in this corner of the world.

Do you feel it limits what you can offer?
I don’t feel limited; we carry over 100 wild products in different forms, some ready-to-eat and some raw. You just have to be more clever and creative to guide people to other products. In the fall, for example, when fresh rockfish is restricted, we suggest other products that are similar or try to persuade them to change their habits for a time.

Have your seafood purveyors worked with you on getting sustainably caught seafood?
Yes.

What trends have you noticed in seafood in the past 10 years?
Consumers want a quick and easy product that’s ready to cook. They want simple ways to prepare fish. They don’t want bones in their salmon. I also see more educated consumers coming in, who know more about wild or farmed products or salmon coming from a specific area of Alaska, like the Copper River, for instance. People are becoming more informed.

Why do you support Seafood Choices Alliance?
I want to be part of a program that highlights information regarding sustainable seafood and provides research, resources, and links that I can access and print out for customers. And it’s been interesting to read what restaurants and chefs look for and require; it’s been interesting to see a different side of it.