Eat Alabama Seafood Program Moving to New Home

By DAVID RAINER, Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

After 13 years, the marketing of Alabama’s seafood is about to have a new home.  The Alabama Gulf Seafood campaign is transitioning from the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (ADCNR) to the Sweet Grown Alabama program, a non-profit that promotes Alabama-grown goods with support from the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries (ADAI), the Alabama Farmers Federation, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative and other industry partners. 

ADCNR Commissioner Chris Blankenship, who has led the Alabama Seafood Marketing Commission (ASMC) Program from the beginning, said the original campaign was created to clear the stigma that had become associated with seafood from the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The program started as an entity with both marketing and testing efforts.

“After the oil spill, as a precaution, a lot of our waters were closed to harvesting seafood,” said Commissioner Blankenship, who was with ADCNR’s Marine Resources Division (MRD) at the time of the largest marine oil spill in history. “There was a lot of concern around the country that the seafood from the Gulf was not going to be safe. Other areas and industries were trying to take advantage of that. The Gulf is known for the quality of the shrimp and how big the oysters are. It’s the largest producer of blue crabs. Other parts of the country were trying to use the oil spill to take market share.

“We needed to do something to protect the seafood industry in Alabama and to show the seafood was still the same quality product and safe to eat.”

Former governor Robert Bentley established the Alabama Seafood Marketing and Testing Commission in 2011 and named Commissioner Blankenship, by then MRD’s Director, as the Program Administrator.

“It was a two-part program,” Commissioner Blankenship said of the marketing and testing aspects of the Commission. “We were testing seafood that was not only caught in our waters but that was being processed in Alabama. We tested thousands and thousands of seafood samples for multiple years, and we never had one sample that was above the level of concern for PAH (oil) or dispersants.”

After three years of testing, the focus of the Commission moved to marketing Alabama’s seafood and industry. With the help of Big Communications in Birmingham, a unique brand and website (www.eatalabamaseafood.com) were created.

“We had to create everything from scratch,” Commissioner Blankenship said. “We had to come up with the plan to not only reach people in Alabama but around the country on the safety and quality of Alabama seafood.

“It turned out for the industry to be a good thing. A lot of places around the country didn’t even know Alabama has a coastline or didn’t appreciate the quality of the seafood we have here. We made a lot of believers out of chefs and consumers in the Southeast and around the country on the quality of Alabama’s seafood products.”

ASMC held events to promote Alabama seafood in big venues like New York City, Washington, D.C., Charleston, S.C., Nashville and New Orleans just to name a few. Those events were successful, but the campaign really paid off in Sweet Home Alabama.

“We built a good following from chefs in those areas,” Commissioner Blankenship said. “But I think the biggest impact was having people in Alabama understand that the seafood in their restaurants – just because it’s on the menu, that doesn’t mean it came from Alabama.

“Getting people to ask the chefs and grocery stores where the seafood came from and ask that they offer Alabama products as opposed to imported seafood was probably one of the greatest successes we had in differentiating Alabama products as being of better quality than some of the other seafood coming in from India or China or Vietnam or Ecuador.”

Last year the Alabama Legislature, led by Rep. Chip Brown and Sen. David Sessions, passed House Bill 66 that requires retailers and restaurants to post on a menu or bulletin board where their seafood comes from.

“I think that is very fitting that, in the last year of the Alabama Seafood Marketing Commission, legislation was passed that mandates what we were already encouraging people to do through the program,” Commissioner Blankenship said. “This will make the work we started last for the foreseeable future.

“Where I really started to see that we had built a brand that had value is when the restaurants and the grocery stores started putting the ‘Alabama Gulf Seafood’ logo on their menus or display cases. When they started doing that, it let me know we had built a following and that the restaurants and stores wanted to show they had quality product there. It was really a good feeling to see we were making strides in the restaurant and business community.”

Seeing the success of the campaign, renowned fashion designer Billy Reid of Florence, Alabama, and Chris Hastings of Hot and Hot Fish Club in Birmingham signed on to help the effort.

“Billy Reid, the menswear designer of the year, saw what we were doing with seafood and wanted to design t-shirts to sell to support the program,” Commissioner Blankenship said. “Chris Hastings of Hot and Hot, when he was a James Beard winner, wanted to partner with us. Back Forty Beer Company of Gadsden wanted to put our logo on the bottles of certain beers that paired well with Alabama Gulf seafood.

“We had other successful businesses wanting to partner with us to help the industry, which was obviously a positive sign that they wanted to be affiliated with us.”

Another high profile chef, Jim Smith, former executive chef for the State of Alabama, has been onboard with ASMC since near the start, serving as chairman for the past 12 years.

“I think the most important thing the Seafood Commission has done is bring a level of awareness around the country of the quality and availability of Alabama seafood,” said Smith, who now runs The Hummingbird Way Oyster Bar in Mobile. “Traveling around the country, we realized a lot of people didn’t know Alabama has a coast or produced seafood. I think we’ve done a really good job of getting the word out. I can’t describe how many times that we’d be at an event in Chicago or LA (Los Angeles) and people were asking how they could get that delicious crab from Alabama we were serving. I think we have done a good job of informing people of the quality of Alabama seafood, it’s harvested in sustainable ways, is readily available, and is a much better alternative than imported seafood.

“We’ve been doing the Alabama Seafood Cook-Off for about 10 years, and it’s done a great job of picking a chef from Alabama who exemplifies what we want to see in the usage of Alabama seafood in ways that promote the seafood industry. I’m proud of the work we’ve done on the Commission.”

From the industry side, Chris Nelson of Bon Secour Fisheries, said the Commission definitely gave Alabama seafood a boost when it needed it the most.

“We definitely established a brand for Alabama seafood, and the logo is pretty well recognized and will continue to live on,” said Nelson, who was a member of the Commission. “We’ve had quite a number of well-done promotions. There’s no question that Alabama seafood has become more recognized and recognizable than it had been before. We were able to go to the Boston seafood show (The Seafood Marketplace for North America) and got quite a lot of visibility there. We were able to get the facts out about Alabama seafood.

“Shrimp is the No. 1 seafood eaten in the world. We were able to tell them why Alabama shrimp tastes different.”

Commissioner Blankenship said passing the promotion of Alabama seafood to Sweet Grown Alabama is a natural fit.

“We’ve worked with Rick Pate, ADAI Commissioner and Sweet Grown Alabama Board Member, to add Alabama seafood to the ‘Sweet Grown Alabama’ program,” Commissioner Blankenship said. “They were already promoting Alabama produce and protein from the cattle and poultry industries, so we thought adding Alabama seafood into what they were doing really made sense. We also hope to transfer the Alabama Seafood Cook-Off to them. That gives them a great opportunity to not only highlight Alabama seafood but also the other great products from Alabama that can be paired with the great seafood. I appreciate Commissioner Pate, Jimmy Parnell and Horace Horn and the work to blend this in with their other promotion of Alabama products.”

The Sweet Grown Alabama team is also excited for this collaboration and the impact pairing seafood and locally grown products has on the state’s economy. 

“Surf and turf just makes sense,” said Commissioner Pate. “When Commissioner Blankenship reached out with the opportunity to continue this longstanding promotion of Alabama Gulf seafood products, our Sweet Grown Alabama board and staff members knew it was an excellent chance to keep connecting Alabama consumers to high-quality, local products while also keeping consumers’ hard-earned dollars right here in our state and helping our farmers and fishermen sell their products.”

Commissioner Blankenship said the continuation of the seafood promotion is especially important because of the hard work of the men and women in the seafood industry.

“Harvesting seafood is a tough job,” he said. “One of our first slogans was ‘With Great Effort Comes Great Seafood,’ because we really wanted to show what it takes to get the crabs, get the oysters, get the shrimp or get the red snapper to the processor to get the seafood to a restaurant or grocery store for us to be able to enjoy it.

“I think we worked hard to build the appreciation for our commercial fishermen in our state and how hard they work. Knowing what blood, sweat and tears went into harvesting of the seafood makes it tastes a little bit better every time I eat it.”

For more information on Alabama’s great seafood, go to https://eatalabamaseafood.com/, and to learn more about Sweet Grown Alabama, go to https://www.sweetgrownalabama.org/.

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