Newport restaurant launches program to use every bit of fish it buys to make new products and reduce waste

By MIA MALDONADO/Oregon Capital Chronicle

NEWPORT— Each year, Local Ocean Seafoods buys 100,000 pounds of fresh whole fish from the fishing vessels just across the street on Yaquina Bay.

The Newport restaurant opened in 2002 in the town’s historic bayfront. It has become a local staple known for serving locally-caught seafood to both residents and tourists.

But this year the restaurant began a new mission focused on uplifting the “blue economy” — or using sustainable ocean resources to grow the local seafood economy.

On average, about half of the weight of the fish the restaurant buys is cut into fillets, leaving nearly 50,000 pounds of fish byproduct to go to waste. In May, the restaurant launched its 100% Fish Program to reduce the amount of fish waste the restaurant was sending to the landfill and turning its fish scraps into high quality products such as dog treats, cat jerky, bone broth and plant spray.

One champion of the program, Rep. David Gomberg, D-Otis, said the program is a pathway to bringing more jobs and eliminating waste along the Oregon coast.

“The essence of the 100% Fish Program is that we get a fish that’s worth $12 and we throw most of that fish away, but if we can use the oils for anything from cosmetics to medicinal uses, if we can use the bones, the skin of the fish for everything from fish leather to skin grafts for burn victims, we can turn that $12 fish into a $2,000 fish,” Gomberg said.

Gomberg sponsored legislation to fund the program this spring, but it didn’t make it to either chamber’s floor, given this year’s budget constraints. However, there’s still interest in the program.

Since launching, Local Ocean’s program has 12 wholesale accounts in Lincoln County who sell their products, and in early November it launched its Faire account so it can do nationwide shipping for wholesale customers.

The program brings economic value to Newport, Darlene Khalafi, the program’s business innovation specialist, told the Capital Chronicle.

It’s an employee-owned-trust with more than 70 employee-owners that work for Local Ocean. More than 60 percent of them are people of color, and more than 55 percent of them are women in the restaurant and hospitality industry, Khalafi said.

“By adding the 100% Fish Program as an additional revenue stream to our business model, we are able to stabilize our income throughout the year outside of the super busy tourism season here,” she said.

Khalafi said the program also aligns with the town’s reputation as a steward of the ocean.

“We have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration here, Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center here, Pacific Seafoods here, our entire fishing fleet here, we’re the Dungeness crab capital of the world and the pride of Newport is that we are one of the first sustainable fisheries in the world,” she said. “I think people around here want to continue paving that path and being pioneers, showing that the blue economy is the future.”

• Oregon Capital Chronicle is a nonprofit Salem-based news service that focuses its reporting on Oregon state government, politics and policy.