Food Bank Scores Huge Haul of 13,000 Fresh Salmon…….There’s Just One Catch: They Were Still Alive



A New York food bank was offered a huge donation of fresh fish recently, but it came with a catch. LocalCoho — a salmon farm in upstate New York  — wanted to donate 40,000 pounds of coho salmon to the Food Bank of Central New York, but the fish were still alive and swimming in the farm’s giant indoor tanks. The organization would need to figure out how to get approximately 13,000 salmon out of the water and then have them processed into frozen fillets…….and they had to do it before the business closed for good. Thanks to dozens of food pantry volunteers, a team was able to empty the tanks and cold pack tons of fish for shipment to a processor. LocalCoho can process about 600 fish a week by hand, but there was less than a month to clear the tanks of nearly 20 times that many fish. With the salmon processed and quick-frozen, it will be distributed among 243 food pantries, as well as shelters and other institutions in the food bank’s network.