USDA Year-End Solicitation Includes 24 Million Pounds of Alaska Seafood

The latest purchase provides over 120 million servings to food insecure Americans.

ASMI is pleased to share some of the recent results of our work with USDA to supply nutritious food to the consumers of America’s food banks and nutrition safety net programs.

At the close of 2021, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued a solicitation to purchase 24M pounds of wild Alaska pollock and salmon products for food and nutrition safety net programs across the country. This closely follows a previous solicitation that is expected to purchase around 1.5M lbs of wild Alaska canned sockeye salmon. These purchases will provide nutritious seafood to millions of children and their families through schools, food banks and other programs.

With this most recent solicitation, USDA intends to buy 7.22 million pounds of wild Alaska pollock fillets, breaded nuggets and sticks as well as 757,000 cases of canned wild Alaska pink salmon for distribution in March thru September 2022. “This purchase will provide over 120M servings of these delicious, sustainable Alaska seafood products,” notes ASMI Global Food Aid Director Bruce Schactler.

USDA program participants will continue to benefit from increased access to healthful wild Alaska pollock and salmon, both of which provide high quality protein and marine omega-3 fatty acids. The added seafood will help participants get closer to the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA, 2020-2025) recommendations of two servings a week of seafood at every age from six months old.

“This was a very welcome year-end announcement for the Alaska pollock and salmon industries,” says Schactler, “which will help even out supply and distribution over the next 8-9 months.”

USDA anticipates further wild Alaska pollock and salmon purchases to assist food insecure Americans throughout 2022 through their many faceted varieties of food and nutrition programs.