Sonia Strobel
VFR: Sonia, tell us about yourself and your journey to becoming the co-founder and CEO of Skipper Otto.
Sonia Strobel: I've always advocated for local food systems and social justice. Since the 1990s, I was a member of Community Supported Agriculture programs; and for over a decade, I worked as a high school teacher, always striving to uplift students from marginalized communities.
Over 20 years ago, I married into a fishing family, and at that time, I couldn't understand why most of us couldn't access local seafood. Back then, it was common for everyone in British Columbia to know a fishing family personally. They would get their fish from these families, supporting their small fishing businesses and keeping money circulating within their communities. Also, for 10,000-15,000 years before settler colonization, Indigenous peoples fed themselves from the bounty of the seas and traded fish with communities as far away as the Rockies.
So why isn't that the case today? I came to realize that we don't have a functioning local seafood system here. What we have is a colonial resource extraction system, designed to extract resources to enrich a distant empire and distant shareholders. And it’s really good at that.
However, if we want local people to eat local seafood and if we want to prevent the disappearance of a small-scale, community-based fishing way of life in B.C., then we're going to have to design a different system.
So that’s what I did in creating one of Canada’s first Community Supported Fishery - Skipper Otto.
When I started Skipper Otto, I had a newborn baby and I was afraid we would lose a fishing way of life in our family. Today I'm proud to say that both my kids are active fishermen with their dad. And not just my family. That's the same for our community of 45 fishing families in BC and Nunavut who harvest for us, and that number is growing every year to meet demand.
VFR: Please share more about Skipper Otto and the basics of how a Community Supported Fishery works.
SS: Skipper Otto is an innovative solution for home cooks to buy seafood directly from fishing families. In our model, 8,000+ member home-cooks pre-purchase a share in the catch before our fishing families even untie from the docks, guaranteeing them a fair market for their catch and ensuring they can raise their kids in their traditional way of life in their coastal and Indigenous communities.
Here's how it works:
Members buy credits before the fishing season starts, starting for as low as $100.
All throughout the fishing season, you will get updates from us letting you know who is catching, what type of seafood, when, where, and how.
This is not like a weekly box program. In our system, you login to our online store whenever you like and pick and choose whatever you want from the catch. The dollar value comes off your pre-purchased credits
Then, you pick up your seafood from one of over 100 pick-up locations across Canada from Victoria to Ottawa.
Every piece of seafood comes with a label that shows the faces and names of the people who caught it, the name of their boat, where they caught it, how they caught it, and a bit about their personal story.
VFR: Tell us more about the fishing industry in British Columbia and why a Community Supported Fishery is so important as well as its advantages for consumers.
SS: The fishing industry in BC is highly export-focused, making it difficult for local people to access local seafood. In Canada, we export 90% of the seafood we catch, while 80% of the seafood consumed in Canada is imported. For many years, investigative journalism and documentaries have exposed the prevalent environmental and human rights abuses in the global industrial seafood system.
Additionally, studies show that over 45% of seafood sold in Canada is mislabeled, so folks can't even be sure what they're getting!
We know that doctors recommend consuming nutrient-dense fish like salmon three times a week for optimal brain and heart health, so what are local consumers to do when facing these challenges?
Becoming a member of Skipper Otto solves many of these problems! Members know exactly who caught each piece of seafood, where, when, and how. They know precisely what their dollars are supporting. And having flash-frozen, sushi-grade seafood in your freezer means that getting nutritious, delicious seafood-based meals on the table any day couldn't be easier!
VFR: Since Skipper Otto was founded in 2008, what are some of the biggest surprises and learnings you’ve experienced along the way?
SS: Starting up a business is a lot like starting a family! For anyone who has kids or who is close to others who do, you'll know what I mean: in those early years, you just do what's right in front of you. It's chaotic, but it's clear and simple: when your baby is hungry, you feed them. When they are tired, you help them sleep. It's the same in a new start-up business: you just do what needs to be done, and in the early years, that meant doing everything from offloading fish to accounting and everything in between.
But over the years, just like in parenting, the job gets more complex, and you have to evolve as a leader to face new kinds of challenges. For me, growing a social-impact company meant finding ways to amplify our social impact. And that required being a different kind of leader from the one who used to work at farmers' markets on Saturday mornings.
One example of how I grew my leadership capacity for impact, was around fishing families. With movements like Me Too and the murder of George Floyd, and the discovery of unmarked graves at former residential school sites, we all needed to consider how our businesses might be unconsciously replicating systems of injustice and oppression.
We took a long, hard look at our roster of fishing families and recognized it was overwhelmingly white and male. Perhaps there were fishermen and women whose voices were not being heard, and maybe what it means to protect a fishing way of life was more complex than our personal experience had taught us. Through this, I embarked on an active listening project to hear from more fishers, more women, Indigenous folks, and new immigrants.
I realized that spending time with new friends on Tseshaht First Nation territory, building trusting relationships with prospective new Indigenous fishers, learning from them, incorporating their ideas and knowledge systems into our work, and co-creating new ways for Skipper Otto to support their livelihoods and help them lift up their communities was a far more valuable use of my time than micro-managing operations.
As a result, we drastically diversified our fleet of fishing families and our staff over the past 5 years. Doing this kind of work to hear from and learn from new voices has been some of the most rewarding work in my 16 years growing Skipper Otto!
VFR: You’ve reached out to Vancouver Food Runners about connecting your seafood to Indigenous-led organizations in Vancouver to help support community access to seafood. Please share more about why this initiative is meaningful to you and the work of Skipper Otto.
SS: I like to say that Skipper Otto is not a just seafood delivery company: we’re a tool for social and environmental justice that happens to come with the best seafood you’ll ever eat!
So much of our work has focused on justice and equity for fishing families and ecosystems. This includes protecting a fishing way of life for Indigenous harvesters so they can continue to live and work in their traditional territory, be paid fairly, and be treated with dignity for harvesting seafood using their traditional, small-scale, and sustainable methods.
However, we're also keenly aware of how seafood has increasingly become a luxury item for a privileged few. This doesn't sit right with us, particularly as it relates to access for Indigenous folks.
Seafood is a right for Indigenous peoples, and it is their medicine. Many Indigenous folks living in urban centres like Vancouver have a hard time accessing their rightful seafood. To address this issue, we reached out to Vancouver Food Runners to help us find new ways to increase access to seafood for marginalized individuals who may lack reliable access to nutritious seafood.
We're excited to have begun a relationship with Kílala Lelum, where we are donating seafood for their chef to prepare for members who come in for their wrap-around care services. It's an honor to learn from the work of the Kílala Lelum team and to collaborate with them toward more just and equitable access to local seafood for folks in their community of care.
VFR: Where can people learn more about becoming a member with Skipper Otto?
We would love to have new members aboard! We have a long wait-list of Indigenous fishing families who want to sell to us and it breaks my heart to hear their ongoing stories of unfair treatment and low payments for their incredibly hard work. More members means I can welcome aboard more of these families each year!
Joining is easy:
Go to https://skipperotto.com/sign-up-open/ where you can buy an initial trial share for just $100.
Plus, if you use coupon code VANFOODRUN (uppercase only), you’ll get an extra $20 credit towards more seafood for free AND we’ll donate $20 of seafood to Kílala Lelum!
We’d love to have you aboard!
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