At midnight, the shore of Hunts Point–where the Bronx meets the East River–comes alive. Crew unload up to a million pounds of fish from shipping containers and haul them into the New Fulton Fish Market, a 700,000 square foot warehouse that replaced the original Fulton Fish Market, which operated in Lower Manhattan from 1822 until it was shuttered in 2005 and moved to the Bronx. Seafood streams into the market from fisheries along the Atlantic Seaboard and around the world, where it lands in a system that, as Mike Spindler, CEO of the startup FultonFishMarket.com tells Fast Company, “really has not changed or modernized in several hundred years.”
FultonFishMarket.com is not, as it may seem, the catchall website for the New Fulton Fish Market. The market itself is a cooperative made up of 24 individual multigenerational, family-run large fish wholesalers that have been in business for decades, some over a century, and distribute to retailers and restaurants in the New York area. FultonFishMarket.com is a separate venture–a startup that curates and sells a selection of fresh, sustainable fish sourced from those wholesalers, and distributes it to both restauranteurs and individual consumers across the U.S. The startup prides itself on speed: An order made in San Francisco, Spindler says, will reach its destination within the same time frame as an order placed in New York. While FultonFishMarket.com will sell frozen fish on occasion, most of it, Spindler says, is delivered fresh.
It is, essentially, the Amazon of fish, but the significance ofbringing data and tech to the fishing industry, Spindler says, is not to be understated. FultonFishMarket.com packs and delivers its products from a stand in the Bronx warehouse, and “anything that comes to our stand goes from 2000 BC to the 21st century in the blink of an eye,” Spindler says.The fish is then packed in cooler boxes, labeled, and sent off to the airport. Most of the flights that FultonFishMarket.com uses leave between 6 and 7 am; to get the fish there on time, it has to depart the market at 4 am. The whole process of selection, recording, and distribution takes around four hours, but it’s designed, Spindler says, to equip consumers with more awareness of the origins and impact of their purchase.
FultonFishMarket.com provides all those details, Spindler says, but only after a consumer places an order–making it somewhat hard to make the most sustainable choice. “The available seafood on any given day may be selected from one dock versus another, or one boat versus another because it is fresher,” Spindler says. “What that means is that the boat, dock, catch method and fishery won’t be known until we actually select the fish for your order.” But the overall aim of the startup, Spindler says, is to deliver only those fish that have been caught by methods which minimize the environmental impact on the locations in which they’re harvested.
FultonFishMarket.com aims to be an alternative to that system by prioritizing fish caught in U.S. waters, where both farmed and wild-caught fish and shellfish are regulated by state and federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. The startup also sources some of its fish from overseas farms, but only those with a proven record of sustainable practices, like Bakkafrost in the Faroe Islands, which raises its salmon on non-GMO feed and uses no antibiotics.
Through the website, individual consumers and restauranteurs can select from the available fish; FultonFishMarket.com also works with what Spindler describes as a “community-supported fishery” model, where a group of people can go in on an order together, and pick up a share of whatever the startup’s quality assurance director has selected as that day’s choicest fish.
FultonFishMarket.com is still a new venture, and as such, its reach is relatively small. “If you measure us against the overall seafood market in America, we’re a blip on the radar,” Spindler says. But the startup’s business has quadrupled since last year, and its revenue is in the millions. That, to Spindler, signals the potential for further growth, but what will drive that, in the end, will be the quality.
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