Greensource—was a Patagonia-like venture that
reached deep into the agricultural supply chain.
In 2005, Berry, then 50, sold Greensource and
returned with his wife to Cascade Head, on the
central Oregon coast, where they’d met at age
15. Two years earlier, they’d launched a nonproft
to create a 527-acre camp, farm, and wilderness
area there.
In Oregon, Berry reconnected with the fshing
peers of his youth. The government ofcial’s
warnings had come true: They were “living in the
red poverty zones of our coastline,” Berry says.
Much of the fsh caught domestically was being
shipped overseas, often for processing in Asia—
some of which was then sold back to the U.S.
“We were selling logs, not furniture,” says Berry,
describing local fsher folk’s failure to capture full
value for what they risked their lives to obtain.
In 2012, Berry co-founded the Portland-based
Fishpeople Seafood with Kipp Baratof, an executive versed in environmentalism and rural economic development. The company works with
independent fshers to source only sustainable
stock from the Arctic Circle to coastal California.
In Toledo, Oregon, Fishpeople built the frst of
what it expects will be several processing plants
where workers receive a living wage and health
insurance—virtually unheard of in the industry.
Fishpeople turns its catch into frozen soups,
meal kits, and fresh and frozen flets, which are
sold by Walmart, Whole Foods, Kroger, Costco,
Safeway, and other major groceries and mass
merchants. A customer can trace her dinner back
to the vessel in whose nets it met its destiny, thanks
to a code that appears on most Fishpeople packaging—a nod to consumers’ desire to know more
about how their food is sourced. “My goal is to
change our relationship with the sea,” says Berry.
The company took unspecifed millions from
investors. “Seafood has a huge ticket to entry,” says
Berry. “It has high capital expenditures to get out
on the ocean, and you have to preserve a product
that spoils very rapidly. I realized there is no way
I am going to bootstrap this.”
Berry goes out on his suppliers’ boats as much
as possible, though these days he’s more apt to
take photos than to cast nets. And while he owns
his own boat, he now prefers skin diving. He loves
to swim with salmon, a fsh he deeply admires.
“If you dropped most humans into the environment that a salmon survives, I don’t think they’d
make it,” Berry says. “Along with the fsher folk
themselves, the fsh are the heroes of our story.”
—LEIGH BUCHANAN
Teach a man
to fsh: The serial
founder who came
back to Oregon
to save the local
fshing industry
THE CULMINATION of Duncan Berry’s lifelong romance with the sea is available in more than 5,000 grocery stores around the country. Fishpeople Seafood, which employs close to 40 workers in-season, delivers for domestic consumption
sustainable seafood caught in American waters by
independent fsher folk. After 20 years of building
fashion companies, Berry returned to the Oregon
coast where he was raised. There, he has rededi-
cated his life to the people and wildlife that make
up “the last industry based on hunting and gath-
ering,” he says. “We have two million years’ worth
of that tradition in our bones.”
Berry, the son of a novelist and a photographer,
spent summers as a deckhand on his older broth-
er’s salmon troller, Legacy I. By the time he was
16, he says, he was the youngest fshing boat
captain in the state, plying the rough chop of the
Columbia River. “It’s known as the graveyard of
the Pacifc,” says Berry. “It’s a rough piece of art.
It made me into a man early on.”
Berry exulted in the purity and simplicity of
life on the water. “On shore, there are trafc jams
and bills to pay,” he says. Afoat, there are “tide
and wind and weather patterns. Gear that gets
fouled. Whales under your boat.” But one day in
1971, Legacy I took on board an Oregon Depart-
ment of Fish and Wildlife ofcial, who predicted
a bleak future. “He said, ‘In 10 years, you guys are
all going to be gone,’ ” recalls Berry. “ ‘Fish stocks
are dwindling. I’d fnd myself another job.’ ”
Berry moved down to the Caribbean and spent
a couple of years sailing, and then earned a degree
in design and metalworking from Evergreen State
College in Olympia, Washington. He started three
businesses in the fashion industry. The last—a
Seattle-based organic cotton company called
WHAT DRIVES YOU
• Sustainable
seafood meals sold
by Fishpeople in
the past four years.
6 million+
• Retail outlets
that carry
Fishpeople’s
soups, meal kits,
and flets.
5,000+
From top: A fshing
boat that catches Pacifc
cod for Fishpeople; an
albacore tuna; a wild-caught tuna and friend
aboard the fshing
vessel Virginia Anne.
FROM
TO
P:
CO
URT
ESY
DIRT
ROA
D
PRO
D
UC
TIO
N
HO
US
E;
D
UN
CA
N
B
ERRY;
L
ARS
HO
LM
DAHL
