The start of the New Year is always met with the start of Alaska’s Pacific Cod and Pollock “A Season” fisheries where the Proposed Total Allowable Catch for the entire 2022/23 season is 1.56 million metric tonnes for Pollock and 132 thousand metric tonnes for Pacific Cod.

Alaskan Snow Crab should start flowing again as Alaskan fishermen typically start harvesting Alaska’s new season in January, however supplies will still be extremely tight as this year’s 2021/22 season had it’s Total Allowable Catch drastically reduced to 5.6 million pounds - compare that to last season’s harvest of 45 million pounds.

Canada’s Snow Crab season typically starts around March/April and has consistently harvested about 70,000 metric tonnes (or 150 million pounds) of Snow Crab between Spring to Fall.

The new Pacific Halibut season will get going in March as well and with the International Pacific Halibut Commissions’ target level of fishing intensity of F-43 percent reference, the 2022 TCEY would be 41.2 million pounds compared to 39 million pounds in the 2021 season.

The final decision on Pacific Halibut fishery limits for the 2022 season will be made on January 28th at the 98th Session of the IPHC Annual Meeting.



Moving onto supply conditions, “Our Recommendation” is to buy whatever you can, and to focus on buying product that is already in North America or on the water.

Just as we mastered Just-In-Time inventory practices, we should look at shifting back to building inventory reserves as there does not seem to be an end in sight for supply chain constraints.

Wild Caught and Farmed Salmon supply continues to be short with Chilean and Norwegian Farmed Salmon pricing actually continuing it’s upward trend.

New season Wild Pacific Salmon won’t be available until Alaska and Russia’s summer fisheries get going again around June.

Inventories of Pacific Cod and Halibut, Pollock and Haddock are all short - and in fact, Haddock is forecasted to become less available over the coming months due to unfavourable harvesting conditions.

On a brighter note, the supply of Dungeness Crab seems to be plentiful since the tri-state Dungeness fisheries from Washington to California actually opened on-time and together on December 1st.



In fact, Oregon (the largest Dungeness producing state), has already harvested over 12.8 million pounds with an ex-vessel value of $66.3 million which is an outstanding start to the year according to Tim Novotny with the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission.

For Pangasius production in Vietnam, although plants have not resumed production yet due to COVID outbreaks, processing plants and the government want to get going as soon as possible to keep the economy moving.

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