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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TINNED FISH IS AS HOT AS EVER IN THE U.S. SO WHY AREN’T WE MAKING
IT OURSELVES?  
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Hannah Walhout
April 4, 2025
Ambrook.com
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_ A lot of American companies are asking the same question: We have
fish here, we have canneries here, why can’t we do what they’re
doing in Europe? _

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Sometime around 2015, Keper Connell had an epiphany while on vacation
in Barcelona. He had long worked as a commercial fisherman, doing all
kinds of fishing jobs throughout the seasons. “But most of that was
just so I could keep catching bluefin tuna,” he said. He loved the
challenge, heading out to the Gulf of Maine from his home in New
Hampshire with just rod and reel. Those expeditions were, as he puts
it, “entirely enjoyable.” But profitable? Not so much.

In Spain, though, Connell learned that bluefin tuna was a prized food
fish — caught every summer the same way it had been for millennia,
much of it packed in olive oil and tinned to enjoy year round. “I
thought, ‘Wow, I’m catching these same fish. How come I can’t
put this in the tin back home?’ It was in the back of my mind for
many years,” Connell said. He continued catching tuna on slim
margins — “not really making any money but knowing full well that,
up the chain, they’re making plenty” on the wholesaler or
restaurateur side — and eventually decided to do the value add
himself. He founded Gulf of Maine Conservas
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It was a good time: Tinned fish was becoming a much-discussed food
world darling, and the U.S. market would go on to grow steadily
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over the next several years. “Americans started to realize this is a
healthy source of protein and all these other nutrients,” said Anna
Hezel, author of the 2023 tinned fish cookbook _Tin to Table
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_who first started noticing the trend bubbling up in the early 2010s.

American consumers also realized that the cheap, water-packed albacore
they grew up with was not their only option. Cans of high-quality fish
from Portugal and Spain, where tinned fish (or _conservas_) is a
longstanding tradition, came back in suitcases as souvenirs and
appeared in greater numbers on grocery shelves. Wine bar menus began
filling with cockles, razor clams, and whole baby squid, packed in
olive oil and sometimes flavored with ingredients like garlic or
chile. At some point, tinned fish became a poster child of affordable
luxury, declared online to be the new “hot girl food
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Still, when it comes to traceable, carefully processed, beautifully
packaged tinned fish, companies like Gulf of Maine Conservas are
relatively rare. Other U.S. brands have sprung up, too — but look at
the tin and you’re likely to see the fish inside was caught and
processed in Europe as a private-label product, then shipped thousands
of miles. As the global tinned-fish market continues to grow, expected
by some estimates
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to nearly double in the next decade, there are a lot of reasons to
start asking: Why don’t we make more of it here?

There are reasons to love tinned fish that aren’t just TikTok
fodder. For one thing, it can be a highly sustainable seafood choice,
often using smaller species that are wild-caught and less prone to
overfishing. Preserving reduces waste and requires less energy for
storage and transport. It also means that a seasonal catch can be sold
year-round, creating new and more reliable markets for fishers.
Especially amid global trade uncertainty — and the threat of a 20
percent blanket tariff on imports from the European Union — there
might be an opening to keep some production local.

“I think a lot of American companies are asking the same question:
We have fish here, we have canneries here, why can’t we do what
they’re doing [in Europe]?” Hezel said. “One of the main reasons
is probably just species availability.” Some fish emblematic of
Iberian conservas are not so easy to come by on this side of the
Atlantic. Our native anchovy, for example, is harvested mostly as bait
fish, and the Pacific sardine fishery has been closed since 2015 due
to overfishing.

Other conservas classics are available domestically, like mackerel,
which Connell sources locally to complement the bluefin he mostly
catches himself. But Gulf of Maine Conservas also offers tins of
something slightly more unusual: smoked eel from the region’s
American eel elver fishery, which are caught as juveniles and raised
in a recirculating aquaculture system
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at American Unagi in Waldoboro, Maine.

Connell is not alone in giving the conservas treatment to American
fish that customers might not be used to seeing in tins (or eating at
all). In Oregon, chef Sara Hauman’s Tiny Fish Co. makes Pacific
Northwest conservas with species like sole, rockfish, or geoduck.
Wildfish Cannery, a brand that grew out of a community salmon cannery
in Alaska, gives some of its tinned salmon a Mediterranean twist and
packs seafood like lingcod or Giant Pacific octopus in high-quality
olive oil.

For Marissa Fellows, founder of Michigan-based Great Lakes Tinned Fish
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trend has provided a new way to support fishers and culinary
traditions in her home state. Fish is big business in the region —
the industry is valued at about $7 billion
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in the culture of life on the water. Still, around 90 percent
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of seafood sold in Michigan is imported. As far as Fellows knows, hers
is the only company of its kind that sources fish exclusively from the
Great Lakes.

One of the most popular native species in the region is lake
whitefish, which Fellows said is synonymous with summer: “People
have family whitefish dip recipes that they eat at their cottages.
It’s this super idyllic, quintessentially Midwestern thing.” Her
tins of cold-smoked whitefish have found an audience among tinned fish
skeptics and aficionados alike. “There’s a little bit of local
pride that comes with that,” she added — “to show people what
the Midwest and the Great Lakes are all about.”

Still, despite her best efforts, it was more or less impossible to
keep the whole supply chain entirely regional: “There’s no fish
cannery in the Midwest,” Fellows explained.

As basic as it is, one huge hurdle to domestic tinned fish production
is a lack of infrastructure. There simply aren’t very many
canneries. “In Spain and Portugal, a lot of the companies that still
exist are canneries that were started by families a hundred years or
more,” Hezel noted — but thanks to consolidation and changing
consumer tastes, many coastal U.S. states don’t have an operating
seafood cannery at all. And building one from scratch tends to be a
prohibitively expensive proposition.

It wasn’t always this way, but the historical seafood processing
model was not necessarily built with longevity in mind. “Just like
lumberyards, [canneries are] built on a resource site,” Connell
explained. Take _Cannery Row_
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of Steinbeck fame: Northern California and the Central Coast were long
centers for the sardine industry, but when the stock crashed in the
mid-20th century, the canneries shuttered. Connell said the situation
in Maine is similar; when herring stock collapsed in the 1970s, the
canneries eventually moved, closed, or were bought up. In late 2024,
the last remaining cannery
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in the state announced that it would be relocating to Delaware.

Though Connell catches or sources all of his seafood from the Gulf of
Maine, he has found that the best option for canning is across the
country in Coos Bay, Oregon. “The Pacific Northwest is really the
only guiding light at this point,” he said. A group of canneries
that popped up around the region’s Albacore fishery about 50 years
ago is still going strong, serving many of the country’s domestic
conservas brands.

In light of the tinned fish renaissance, some in that area are
expanding. Western Washington’s iconic Taylor Shellfish
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into the canning business recently, about a century after the Taylors
first started farming oysters in South Puget Sound. Wes Taylor, a
fifth-generation employee, explained that it started with a small deal
between neighbors: The owners of a local oyster operation called Ekone
were looking to retire and approached Taylor Shellfish to look after
their business, including the small cannery and smokehouse they’d
built by their tidelands on Willapa Bay.

Another sign of a potential groundswell: The East Coast recently saw
the opening of its first new cannery in more than 80 years
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Island Creek Oysters began operations at its new facility in the
seafood capital of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in June 2024. One hope
is that the cannery will provide a more consistent market for local
shellfish farms; Island Creek buys from more than 100 of them for its
tinned fish line, which also includes products from a co-packer in
Spain.

Aside from the infrastructure challenges, some amount of consumer
education and market-building is likely still ahead if U.S. conservas
are to really thrive. This could include increasing awareness of local
species, tying this style of seafood into the locavore movement, and
emphasizing all the ways that tinned fish, already a sustainable
choice, can be made even more so while celebrating seafood
biodiversity. Fellows noted that chefs can be an asset in introducing
these products to new audiences. “I’ve been met with a lot of
sheer enthusiasm,” she said of her deepening ties in the Michigan
restaurant industry. “Doors are opening left and right.”

But paying fairly, producing on a small scale, and keeping the supply
chain close to home — that all adds up, and the pricing of brands
like these can be another hurdle. Transparency about why these tins
cost much more than the cents people might used to be paying for an
inferior product is important. So is a certain degree of smart
branding, which has helped companies like Fishwife — which mostly
imports its fish but processes some of it at a cannery on the West
Coast — achieve massive success. Hezel is confident that the “get
what you pay for” mindset that conscious consumers bring to other
foods can be leveraged to recast domestic conservas as something to be
coveted: “I think there is opportunity for American companies to
build products that have the same amount of cultural currency.”

In the end, Connell said, it’s a rising-tide situation — the more
companies, canneries, and customers, the better. “Is this really a
substantial industry? Can it be bolstered? I think it can. And the
closer you get to the consumer’s mouth, the easier it is.” Connell
also noted that objections to the price tag tend to arise only before
someone has actually tasted the fish in the tin. “My only response
is, ‘Please try it,’” he said, “and it’s quickly
overcome.”

HANNAH WALHOUT

Hannah Walhout is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She
has previously been on staff at FoodPrint, _Travel + Leisure,_ and
_Food & Wine,_ and now covers food, culture, design, sustainability,
and the ways they collide for various print and digital publications.

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