Keeping Oregon Seafood in Oregon
- Steve Card
- 14 minutes ago
- 5 min read
By Steve Card
A crowd of around 50 people gathered under sunny skies on Saturday, Aug. 2, for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate a new era of discovery and innovation at the Central Coast Food Web, located on Yaquina Bay Road about three miles east of Newport.
The mission of the Central Coast Food Web is to strengthen local, coastal and regional food systems by providing services and support to small, independent food producers and making it easier for all people to buy and to eat local food.
What many people may be surprised to learn is that only a small percent of the seafood served in Oregon restaurants comes from Oregon waters. The major reasons for this are things like the reliability of supply and the price. The Central Coast Food Web hopes to change that by keeping more local seafood in Oregon.
The concept began about five years ago, when Laura Anderson, founder of Local Ocean Seafoods in Newport, was looking for more space to store the fresh seafood it was preparing each day in its restaurant, and also selling in its fish market. After purchasing a building and property at 3814 Yaquina Bay Road, it was soon apparent that the facility had more space than what Local Ocean needed, and that set the foundation for what became the Central Coast Food Web.
The food web is a nonprofit organization that provides the services and infrastructure needed to overcome limitations in the current food system — its facilities provide shared space and equipment at low risk and low cost to seafood and farm businesses to process, package, and store their products. The first shared-use facility of its kind in the area, known as the "Yaquina Lab,” is making it economically viable to direct market agricultural and seafood products both in the community and around the region.
“As a restauranteur here for the last 20 years, I definitely know firsthand that people come here to eat seafood, and they presume that most of what they’re eating is from around here,” Anderson said. “What the study has shown is that’s just not the case, so clearly, something is broken in the seafood supply chain when our high quality, high value seafood that’s right out our own back door is bypassing our community and going elsewhere, and we’re bringing in imported and farmed seafoods to people. Everybody that learns that has the same reaction. They’re just like, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’ It’s shocking.”
Jim King, executive director of the Central Coast Food Web, kicked off the Aug. 2 ribbon-cutting event, saying, “It was a lot of work to get this thing started, and to build the foundation that has been really important to get where we are today.”
A big driver in getting to this point was the Oregon Coast Visitors Association, and in particular, Marcus Hinz, the OCVA’s executive director. King said Hinz is one of the partners who has shared the work as well as the journey of the food web. “He believed that seafood, the fisheries themselves, kelp beds and even urchins impacted visitors’ experience, so he found funding to support those and more,” King said of Hinz. “The health of the ecosystem creates a healthy coast, economic development and vast opportunities, which would not exist without people like this.”
Hinz also spoke during the ribbon cutting, telling those in attendance, “You are standing here at a facility that supports people who grow, harvest, process, cook, package and deliver food. People who raise funding, coordinate logistics, conduct research, and educate the public about the critical importance of where our food comes from. They are therefore all active cultivators and caretakers of our shared food system.”
Hinz added that innovation doesn’t only happen in boardrooms and research laboratories. “It also happens here on the ground in places like this, in walk-in freezers, in shared kitchens and mariculture tanks.
And that is exactly what today is about.”
Hinz described the facility as an entrepreneurial platform, a launching point for new producers, new ideas and, hopefully, a new era for coastal food innovation.
“These facilities provide shared space and equipment at low-cost, low-risk to seafood and farm businesses so they can process and package and store and deliver their products. This place is the first shared-use facility in this area.”
Hinz then introduced Laura Anderson, who he described as a local champion, “a champion with focus and staying power because these things just take time. A champion with solid operations experience, a savvy business person, a trusted and respected leader,” he said.
Anderson greeted the crowd. “Welcome to the Yaquina Lab facility, home of the Central Coast Food Web and over a dozen businesses now, and growing,” she said. “When my husband and I started this back in 2020, it was really kind of just a simple idea that if we had the space we could create the conditions for good things to happen. Lo and behold, good things are happening here, and it’s so cool to celebrate that all with you.”
The facility would not have been possible were in not for state funding authorized by the Oregon Legislature in 2023 through House Bill 3410, which was written by State Rep. David Gomberg. Gomberg was instrumental in getting that bill passed in the House, and Lincoln County’s senator, Dick Anderson, helped secure its passage in the Senate.
Gomberg attended the recent ribbon cutting, stressing the importance of keeping food local. “When we brought dollars back to the Oregon Coast Visitors Association to work on that challenge, the result was places just like this, so that we could address those core challenges and find ways to make sure we could not only deal with price, but deal with a reliable supply chain — so that we could be ordering fish and chips from our own waters in February, as well as in June,” he said.
Gomberg said another important thing coming out of all this is addressing the innovative, and often misunderstood concept of 100 percent fish. “We’re talking about the opportunity to take a $12 fish and turn it into a $1,000 fish,” he said. “How do we do that? Well certainly we fillet it and we freeze and serve and disperse the seafood, but there’s lots of other stuff left over. Coming from examples that we’ve seen, particularly in Iceland, they’re making cosmetics, they’re using the oils, they are making leathers from the fish skins, they are making dog treats … and remarkable to me, they are doing skin grafts with fish skins to help burn victims.”
This supports the economy and environment by not throwing the fish waste away, but instead turning it into something practical, usable and profitable.
“So that’s what the future here looks like,” Gomberg said. “I’m excited about the progress we’ve made to far, but I’m even more excited about the progress that lies ahead of us.”
Sen. Dick Anderson also spoke to the crowd, saying that a ribbon-cutting event like this signifies real progress in what began as just an idea. “Nothing happens single-handedly in the legislature,” he said. “The Coast Caucus — seven legislative members — all gathered together, supported this issue and many others, and that’s what makes things happen for the coast. When we get together, we start talking with our peers, our members different committees, and that’s what make things happen.“
To learn more about the Central Coast Food Web, and to purchase local seafood and farm products through its online market, check out CentralCoastFoodWeb.org
