A cannery in Southeast Alaska is at the forefront of America’s tinned fish renaissance

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Wildfish Cannery was founded in Klawock, Alaska in the late 1980s by a school teacher named Phyllis Mueller. Her grandson Mathew Scaletta is at the helm these days.

Scaletta is passionate about food. He spent summers cutting fish at the cannery as a kid and then cut his teeth in the culinary world in Chicago and Portland. While working everywhere from bars to fine dining restaurants, he noticed something.

“Places were importing Spanish and Portuguese canned fish. It was kind of quietly becoming a thing,” Scaletta said. At the time, he said, canned salmon stateside was cheap – probably better for stocking a fallout shelter than a charcuterie board.

Then, Scaletta said he saw something that changed everything: an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show “No Reservations.”

In the episode, Bourdain visits Espinaler Taverna, a tavern in the Spanish seaside town of Vilassar de Mar. The bartop is lined with dozens of bowls of oily little fish, smoked oysters, and cured seafoods.

Bourdain samples a can of razor clams that his guide tells him costs more than $150 USD.

‘ Rest assured this stuff bears no resemblance to the can of smoked oysters you ate stoned and desperate back in college,’ Bourdain narrates over the din of the packed tapas bar. ‘This is the world’s best seafood and here’s what’s so mind blowing: it only gets better in the can.’

“It kind of blew my mind to see that, right? And it stuck with me,” said Scaletta.

In 2015, Scaletta’s grandmother Phyllis was diagnosed with cancer. He came home to Alaska and took over the cannery.

Scaletta said he saw a hole in the market.

“So I set out to be the first U.S.-based highend craft cannery. And we're still there,” he said. “I'm still working on that.”

Wildfish’s garlic sumac rockfish or smoked coho go for about $10-$14 a can. The most expensive offering is a $40 can of fried king salmon cheeks. Since Scaletta started smoking salmon for the slightly spendier masses, tinned fish is officially on the map in the U.S . But he doesn’t take credit for that.

“There were other companies who came in after us, who, frankly, just had a lot more money,” he laughed.

According to Scaletta, the business – and tinned fish in general – really took off in the United States in 2020. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2022, U.S. sales of canned seafood rose by nearly $3 billion and are still growing annually. Scaletta said he hopes to soon expand to a second cannery in Klawock. He said it's hard to keep his more popular products in stock, nowadays, maybe partly due to some significant national attention on his company.

Marguerite Preston edits the kitchen section of Wirecutter, a product review outlet from the New York Times. As the editor, Preston doesn’t normally do the actual reviewing, but she said she really wanted to write a guide to tinned fish.

“Obviously, tinned fish has been around in all kinds of forms for centuries. In many cultures, it's never gone out of style. But in America, it's becoming trendy,” she said, adding that she’d been seeing sleek new brands of canned seafood everywhere. “I would say in the past maybe three years, maybe a little bit longer, we've just seen this growing interest, these trendy new brands, this beautiful packaging.”

Preston and her team collected over 100 different tins, jars, and cans of fish from Europe, Asia, and the U.S. and laid them all out on the counter of their office in Brooklyn. They grouped the fish into categories and split up the tasting over three days.

“And then we just kind of went at it and felt really pretty ill at the end of each day to be honest,” she laughed.

Preston published her findings on Wirecutter ’s website in December. The guide is like an olympics for tinned fish, with each category crowning a world champion. Preston said when it came to sampling salmon, the unanimous favorite was Wildfish Cannery.

“I think the thing that stood out the most was the texture, it just had the most buttery, meaty, succulent texture. And then the flavor was really good too – the level of smoke. You can tell just by looking at them. They have this beautiful, kind of burnished look on top,” Preston said of Wildfish’s smoked king and sockeye salmon.

Scaletta said it was thrilling to see his small cannery getting national press. The art of canned fish isn’t a “new trend” to an Alaskan though. The state’s culture of homecanning was a major inspiration for Wildfish.

“One of the most precious things an Alaskan has in your pantry is your home-pack – like your smoked and jarred salmon, right?” Scaletta said. “This is about taking what we already had, which was this culture of home-pack, and the idea of a jar of smoked salmon being elevated, and kind of bringing that to the masses.”

As tinned fish solidifies itself as a high class snack, Wildfish is going to continue to do what Alaska canneries have always done according to Scaletta – buying high-quality fish from local fishermen and canning it for the masses.

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A cannery in Southeast Alaska is at the forefront of America’s tinned fish renaissance

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