Today we’d like to introduce you to Nathanael Ferguson.
Hi Nathanael, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I grew up in a commercial fishing family in the small village of Pelican, Alaska. We spent somewhere around half of every year at sea fishing for Salmon, Halibut, and Cod. Eventually, I moved away, went to college and married a Texan. The journey wasn’t quite that direct and there were a lot of detours along the way including a seven-year stint in the Washington DC area, but that’s the basic story of how I ended up in the Austin area. When you marry a Texan you eventually live in Texas!
One thing my wife, Sarah, and I found about Austin is there isn’t much good seafood around, especially not good Alaskan seafood. In 2018 we decided to fix the problem by selling Alaskan seafood to friends and neighbors. Many of the friends I grew up with are still commercial fishermen in Alaska and one of my closest childhood friends, Seth Stewart, owns a boutique fish processing company in the town we grew up in.
Almost on a whim, I called Seth and asked him to ship me 350lb of Salmon and Halibut so we could test the idea that Texans would buy premium wild-caught Alaskan seafood at local farmers’ markets. I told my wife that worst case scenario if people don’t buy it we’ll have a couple of years’ worth of seafood put up in the freezer to eat ourselves. Thankfully it didn’t come to that!
As it turns out, we weren’t the only ones in the area craving premium Alaskan seafood. In August of 2018, we started selling fish at the Old Town Leander Farmers Market which at the time was five minutes from our house. Our fish was a hit right away. It didn’t take long to sell the initial 350lb, pay the invoice, and place another order. Gradually we added more markets to our rotation, grew a customer base, and had to decide whether we wanted this to be a weekend hobby or a full-time business.
We chose to take it full time and by September of 2021 Sarah and I had both left our jobs and plunged full steam ahead into the seafood business! Now we are in 6-7 markets a week and have two people working part-time running a booth for us at markets. Our product lineup has increased from Halibut and two species of Salmon to now include Halibut and all five species of Salmon, as well as Black Cod, Lingcod, Yelloweye Rockfish, Scallops, Spot Prawns, Dungeness Crab, and Bairdi Crab when seasonally available. We also offer specialty products including salmon collars and heads, caviar, smoked salmon, and more.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road has definitely not been smooth. The road has been long, and littered with bumps and crater-size potholes. One of the first big challenges was the loss of our Saturdays. To this day we have not taken a Saturday off of markets since 2018 except when forced to by weather such as the 2021 Arctic storm that brought Alaska to Texas for a week in February. I can count on one hand the number of Saturdays that we have had someone else cover our markets so that Sarah and I could both be out of town at the same time. This has also been a challenge for our kids who go to work with us most Saturdays. It’s great for them to see Mom and Dad work hard but it’s also tough for them not to have the day to sleep in and relax at home. It’s always nice for them on the days when we can get a sitter and they get to stay home.
Of course, our biggest challenge was the same as everyone else’s; COVID-19. We continued selling seafood throughout the pandemic and actually ramped up our efforts because we had plenty of inventory at a time when grocery stores were struggling to keep basic things in stock. A couple of the markets we participated in closed down for several months during 2020 so we had to find new ways to get our products to customers. During that time, many of our customers were almost complete shut-ins and we started delivering fish to their doorsteps. It was during that time that I figured out how to build and launch an online store.
Most of our seafood is held in cold storage in Juneau until we have room for it locally. We buy way more than we have room to store here. Since wild-caught seafood is only available seasonally, we have to buy enough when it’s in season to get us through the year. During the first year of COVID, we had serious supply disruptions where we could not consistently get our inventory from Alaska to Austin. Several times we had to have shipments routed to Dallas or Houston and pick up there. It was difficult for a while but things have pretty much returned to normal now.
Of course, pricing has also been a major issue. Prices for wild-caught seafood have spiked wildly since the beginning of the pandemic and continue to be volatile due to current economic conditions. In the course of one year, the price we pay for scallops increased 71% and the price to get them shipped to Austin increased 38% which is just unreal!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Our specialty is bringing premium, wild, line-caught Alaskan seafood to customers throughout Central Texas in a way that is direct, traceable, and sustainable. Every fish we sell is line-caught, meaning they are not mass-harvested in net fisheries. Each fish bites a hook, is landed on the boat one at a time, and is hand processed by the fishermen on the spot. We only buy from fishermen who use special handling techniques to preserve the freshness and quality of the fish. We call it white glove treatment. And we have total traceability. We know where the fish are caught, by what boat, and how they are handled. On most of our labels, we put the name of the boat that harvested the fish. In most cases the fishermen are people I grew up around, some were next-door neighbors.
During the summer fishing season, we even offer our customers the opportunity to buy a whole fresh salmon straight off the boat. When we do this, our customers are getting fish that are 1-2 days off the boat depending on how the flights connect getting them out of remote Alaska!
I think the thing that I am most proud of is how we were able to continue getting high-quality food to people during the darkest days of the pandemic when there were long lines at grocery stores and by the time you got in there wasn’t much if anything left in the meat department. I remember going to the store once during that time and the only meat left in the entire store was a lonely tub of chicken livers. During those days it felt very much like we were doing more than running a business. It felt like we were providing a public service connecting people with foods they were struggling to access elsewhere.
We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
I mentioned earlier that my path to the Austin area wasn’t exactly direct. Once upon a time, in what seems like an entirely different lifetime, I worked for a small travel agency in the Washington, DC area. We arranged tours for classical orchestras and choirs. Sometimes that meant bringing clients from overseas to the United States but mostly it meant arranging overseas tours for U.S. based clients, or even tours for international clients traveling from one part of the world to another. I got to travel with many of the groups I arranged tours for so I got to see a lot of the world. I took a youth symphony orchestra to Brazil in 2006, a different youth symphony orchestra to Europe in 2007, and a choir from Hong Kong to Russia in 2008. There were many others but these were some of the more memorable trips. That was all fun and interesting, but on just about any given Saturday, I’d rather be slinging salmon for Central Texans at a farmers market somewhere in Austin!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.savoryalaska.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/savoryalaska/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SavoryAlaska
the boat that I grew up on. I remember very vividly the day that photo was taken. We were fishing in some rough water
