[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 184 (Wednesday, October 20, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7100-S7102]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                       Remembering Chuck Bundrant

  Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, this afternoon I come to the floor to 
recognize the life and the contributions

[[Page S7101]]

of a friend, an Alaskan, a gentleman: Chuck Bundrant. He was the 
founder and the majority owner of Trident Seafoods and a fisherman who 
really forever changed the seafood industry in Alaska.
  Employing thousands of people across Alaska and the country and 
processing hundreds of millions of pounds of finished seafood products 
each year, Trident is the largest vertically integrated seafood 
harvesting and processing company in North America today.
  The company--and, really, by extension, Chuck Bundrant--has been 
critical in giving the rest of the United States and the world a taste 
of Alaska's delicious and, of course, sustainably managed wild seafood.
  Chuck has a pretty interesting story. He didn't grow up in Alaska. He 
didn't even grow up near the ocean. He was born in Tennessee. He was 
raised there and in Indiana. He had initially hoped to pursue 
veterinary medicine and enrolled in a pre-veterinary program at Middle 
Tennessee State University.
  But by the winter of 1961--19 years old; he has $80 in his pocket--he 
and a few friends drove from Tennessee to Seattle with the thought that 
they would make it up to Alaska. At that point in time, he didn't have 
any experience, any exposure to the State. Apparently, he had watched 
the John Wayne movie called ``North to Alaska,'' and that kind of 
spurred him.
  But he had heard that there were some pretty lucrative opportunities 
within the fishing industry, but he also knew that finding a job wasn't 
going to be an easy task. So, apparently, his buddies reconsidered the 
merits of the trip, but Chuck doubled down and continued on his way to 
the dream of working in The Last Frontier.
  So, according to legend, he spent his first summer in the State 
working wherever he could in the Bristol Bay fishing industry, even 
sleeping under a boat on the docks. He eventually got a job busting 
freezers--which, for colleagues, means literally banging metal pans to 
knock loose the blocks of frozen shelled crab--and he was out on a 
floating processor anchored near Adak out in the Aleutians.
  Like so many who have the chance to come and visit Alaska, Chuck 
wasn't satisfied with just one quick stint in the State. He turned his 
journey north into a 12-year learning experience--and, really, a 
lifelong business.
  By 1965, he had worked his way up from the freezer hold to buying his 
first crab fishing boat. As Chuck gained more experience in and 
understanding of the crab fishery, he noticed that there was an 
inefficiency in the way that the industry operated. After bringing in 
the harvest, most fishermen would then head back to shore to hand it 
off to the shoreside processing outfits, where the crab meat would be 
removed from the shells and then sent to market. And just a lot of back 
and forth here meant that the fisherman loses valuable time at sea. And 
this is where Chuck's ingenuity really struck.
  In the early 1970s, he and two other crab fishermen, Kaare Ness and 
Mike Jacobson, used whatever collective earnings they had at that point 
in time and they built the Billikin, which was a 135-foot boat with 
both crab cookers and freezing equipment that allowed for immediate 
onboard processing. So this was new. This was novel at the time.
  Chuck pushed on. He kept fishing and processing on the Billikin. 
There were protests from other Bering Sea crab fishermen who were in 
the middle of a strike to secure better prices from processors. Around 
this same time, he, Kaare, and Mike partnered with another individual, 
Edd Perry and his Bellingham-based company San Juan Seafoods. And this 
was, really, the beginning of Trident Seafoods in 1973.
  Trident's early years coincided with a phaseout of foreign fleets 
from the North Pacific harvest due to the enactment in 1976 of the 
Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act--we know it as 
the MSA--and, also, a burgeoning Japanese market for Alaska frozen 
fish, salmon, and herring. So Chuck and his colleagues took advantage 
of this opening. They built a fleet of mobile processing vessels that, 
really, very quickly made their mark on Alaska fisheries.
  Chuck's competitive, resourceful mentality, again, proved useful as 
king crab numbers and harvest started to decline in the early 1980s. In 
the seventies, he had watched giant Japanese, Korean, and Norwegian 
trawling vessels rake in billions of pounds of pollock from the Bering 
Sea. And then with the enactment of the MSA in 1976, it extended U.S. 
fisheries jurisdiction to 200 miles offshore, giving American fishermen 
priority access to stocks of abundant fish, like pollock, that 
inhabited Alaska's coastal waters.
  There was a significant market opportunity for pollock in Japan, but 
in America at the time, pollock was kind of considered a junk fish, a 
trash fish. And what is more, American boats and processors did not 
have the equipment to harvest pollock, to extract its roe that was very 
popular in Japan, and to transform its flesh into commonly consumed 
surimi paste and fillets.
  But Chuck saw things with a vision. He saw this as an opportunity and 
not pollock as a trash or poor investment. He studied Japanese methods 
for catching and processing pollock. He strategized about how Trident 
could enter this market and, in 1981, he took a pretty bold move. He 
built a plant on a very remote Aleutian island, Akutan, for onshore 
processing of crab; salmon; and, of course, pollock.
  So Chuck really took a risk there. He, after years of trying to 
convince food wholesalers and restaurant owners to take a chance on 
pollock, was able to secure a pretty pivotal deal between Trident and 
Long John Silver's. This was the first major contract to bring the fish 
to U.S. market. And this deal didn't take place in some fancy 
restaurant in some major city. This deal took place out in Akutan--the 
Akutan processing facility that he had taken this chance on back in 
1981.
  So companies like McDonald's, Burger King soon followed Long John 
Silver's in replacing cod and whiting with very tasty, and now cheaper, 
pollock. And these companies have grown to become some of Trident's 
biggest customers. Odds are that if you have tried their fish and chips 
or fish sandwiches, you have probably tried Trident product.
  Today, Seattle-based Trident operates a fleet of 40 vessels, 
including catcher processors, trawlers, crab boats, tenders and 
freighters; 11 processing plants in Alaska--so good jobs in Alaska--5 
processing plants in Washington State, Georgia, and Minnesota. It 
offers a host of frozen, canned, smoked, and ready-to-eat seafood 
products; and its harvest-and-business model means they know exactly 
where its products come from. That is important to us.
  But as Trident has grown and propelled the industry forward, Chuck 
remains steadfast in his commitment that Trident remain a family 
business that supports its employees and the independent fishermen that 
it partners with. Chuck's son Joe now serves as the company's CEO. He 
has continued his dad's efforts to seek out new value-added products 
that can be created from Alaska fish.
  It is always a good story, I think, to know of these very successful 
businesses that keep grounded with the base from which they began; and 
with Chuck, it was really important that his family continued to be 
part of this success story.
  I am told that Chuck had some pretty strict rules, that if any of his 
grandkids--and I think he has about 13 of them--if any of them decide 
that they want to work for the family business, you first have to earn 
a college degree, which Chuck did not have; but they also had to spend 
at least 4 years working someplace else other than Trident; and they 
had to have cut their teeth and fished at least two summers in Alaska.
  So he wanted to make sure that you weren't just going to get the job 
just because you were a member of the family. You worked for it; you 
knew what this was all about.
  It really is difficult to overstate the impact that Chuck has had on 
his fellow fishermen. Beyond the industry innovation that he drove, he 
always sought to pay it forward, to offer younger fishermen the same 
mentorship and support that allowed him to get his start in the 1960s 
and the seventies and to make Trident the company that it is today.
  And this dovetails, really, with Chuck Bundrant's commitment to 
charitable giving. He was generous in so many, many different ways. He

[[Page S7102]]

raised and donated money for the victims of the Tohoku earthquake, the 
tsunami in Japan, Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and contributed 
to multiple cancer research foundations.
  I have certainly seen his generosity as he has shared in ways that 
demonstrate his compassion, his care. His influence on the fishing 
community is really clear from the outpouring of love and support that 
he has received since he was diagnosed with an atypical form of 
Parkinson's.
  In September of 2019, four of the captains from the TV show the 
``Deadliest Catch''--all of whom considered Chuck a mentor, a friend, 
and, really, an inspiration--co-hosted what they called Captains for a 
CURE fundraiser. It was an auction for the northwest chapter of the 
American Parkinson's Disease Association. They raised nearly $380,000 
at the event, and this money goes towards a Parkinson's disease 
research grant in Chuck's honor--again, trying to shine a light on the 
specific form of disease that Chuck lived with.
  I received a note from Joe Bundrant on Sunday, when Chuck Bundrant 
passed from this Earth, and I wanted to share just a couple sentences 
from a personal email. He says:

       Dying is not easy, but Chuck was up to the task and faced 
     death on this earth as he faced rogue waves in Alaska: head-
     on with dignity, determination and with the faith that he 
     would be safe in God's hands.

  He goes on further to say that ``he lived each day fully, driven by 
the values of integrity, loyalty, hard work and most importantly 
faith.''
  And so as I have reflected on the life of, really, an extraordinary 
man, it strikes me that, at the end of the day, this individual, Chuck 
Bundrant, was a family man, cared for his family deeply; but he, at the 
base of it, was a fisherman. And he lived his life in a way that really 
speaks to the values of integrity; loyalty; hard work; and, most 
importantly, faith.
  To his family, to his wife Diane: Know that our hearts are with you. 
We thank you for sharing a truly honorable man with so many of us.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.