Chuck Bundrant was a college freshman with $80 in his pocket when he drove halfway across the country to Seattle to earn a few bucks fishing. The year was 1961.
He hasn’t stopped fishing since.
And today, Bundrant, the founder and majority owner of Trident Seafoods, is worth at least $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth is due to a fair measure of pluck. Back in the early 1980s, he persuaded Americans to eat pollock, then considered a trash fish, at fast-food restaurants and, to this day, Trident ships it -- along with salmon and cod -- to chains including Costco and Safeway.
Along the way, Bundrant cultivated politicians who would pass legislation that aided Trident’s business by keeping foreign fisheries at bay. These days, Trident also is benefiting from health-conscious consumers gravitating to seafood.
The Bloomberg index calculates that Bundrant owns 51 percent of privately-held Trident, which had $2.4 billion in revenue last year, based on information compiled from trade groups. It’s valued by the Bloomberg index at about $2.1 billion, using comparisons to five publicly traded peer companies, including Clearwater Seafoods Inc. and Oceana Group Ltd. Trident operates about 16 processing plants and 41 fishing vessels -- and remains defiantly independent.
“We don’t answer to investment bankers like some other seafood companies,’’ the company writes on its website. “We only answer to our customers, our fishermen, and our employees.”
Bundrant declined to comment. He named his son, Joe, chief executive officer in 2013 and is not involved in day-to-day operations, but longtime friend Brent Paine, executive director of trade association United Catcher Boats, recalls him as a "huge risk-taker, someone with an open mind for opportunity."
Knew Nothing
Chuck Bundrant’s story is the stuff of industry legend. “He knew nothing about fishing boats, or catching and processing crab and salmon,’’ son Joe said in a corporate video two years ago. “He’d only watched a movie with John Wayne in it called ‘North to Alaska.’ And he heard there was money to be made on the fishing grounds, thousands and thousands of miles from home.’’
As told to Seattle publications and on Trident’s website, Bundrant was taking a break from a pre-veterinary medicine program in Tennessee when he traveled to Seattle, making his way to Bristol Bay, Alaska, where he slept on the docks and took any work he could get.