How Jenice Yu is reshaping B.C.’s relationship with local seafood — one fish, one meal and one innovation at a time.
The production floor is relatively quiet as customer orders for the day are boxed and waiting to be picked up for delivery. The long, clean metal tables glimmer under the bright lights, and the large display freezer at the back of the room is stocked with wild halibut Thai curry and burgers, New England clam chowder, seafood congee and potpies, uni pasta sauce, wild lingcod cakes, whole cooked wild sea cucumber, marinated black cod steaks — and so much more. The production crew now has time to test new recipes as they wait for more orders and for the latest seasonal catch to come in and be processed and prepared. Halibut season is just starting; demand is ramping up.
Business is good, but this past year has been challenging for Jenice Yu and her team from Eatfish.ca, previously knownas Fresh Ideas Start Here (f.i.s.h.). Yu, who jokingly refers to herself as the “Sea-E-O,” made the difficult decision to close retail operations last year and now focuses on fine-tuning the new business model of selling wholesale and online with their new fish processing plant on Mitchell Island.
“When I decided to make this drastic change last May, we thought if I was only going to do this for a couple more years I would have stayed exactly the same way,” she says. “But if I want to do this forever, we have to change.” Although some customers were upset, over time many embraced the new model, but “There was definitely a large learning curve.”
After closing its retail stores, eatfish.ca has entered a new era focused on wholesale and ready-to-eat products. At the company’s Mitchell Island facility, Jenice Yu and her team — including Welbert Choi, Meighan Makarchuk and Mikey Flestado, shown top left — continue to develop creative offerings such as seafood congee and coconut crab chowder while championing local, sustainable seafood.
Known as a passionate advocate for promoting and supplying sustainable West Coast seafood, Yu grew up in her family’s fish processing plant, also on Mitchell Island. Established in 1989, Grand Hale Marine harvests, processes and exports locally sourced seafood.
“My mom and my two uncles started the seafood business,” says Yu. “They were immigrants from Hong Kong and were here studying economics at SFU and then decided to stay as they saw a need in Asia. They were always exporting the seafood.”
Her mother moved back to Hong Kong with Yu when she was four, but they returned to help out with the business six years later. The transition back to Canada was a culture shock as she often had to spend time in her family’s fish processing plant after school.
At first, Yu saw it as “kind of tragic,” but she grew to appreciate her time at the plant and took it upon herself to learn more about the family business. It also helped to shape who she is today — a savvy, resilient businesswoman and an exceptional problem solver who just wants people to eat more local fish.
“I always called myself a fish girl with a dream as I don’t have extensive education on how to run a business, but I definitely knew where I wanted this business to go.” She also wondered why B.C.’s best seafood was not always available locally.
Yu made it her mission to increase awareness of West Coast seafood by making it accessible for home cooks and increasingly available on menus across Metro Vancouver. She wanted to change the culture of our seafood industry.
“Back then there was sea bass and tiger prawns [not local to the West Coast] on the fancy restaurant menus. I used to bring spot prawns and black cod to school for lunch, and no one knew what they were,” Yu says. “So I think it was always something I wanted to do.”
After working in restaurants with industry giants such as Bruno Marti and Scott Jaeger, and a short stint as a private investigator, Yu took the reins of the retail arm of her family’s export business with the goal of supplying fresh local seafood. The first storefront for f.i.s.h. opened in 2008 in Burnaby, and in 2016, she opened a second location in Vancouver while continuing to supply to many of the city’s finest restaurants.
“When I opened the store, I will always feel that I was very lucky to have that opportunity. But I certainly was thrown into the fire and kind of survived. Everything is a learning curve for me.”
It took a while for Yu to learn how to run the business. In the beginning, she didn’t even know how to properly butcher a fish and had to look it up on YouTube.
“I had summer jobs at the fish plant growing up, but it wasn’t cutting fish. My jobs were pin-boning salmon or standing at the end of a sea urchin line where they’re packing sea urchin trays with tiny tweezers. And because I’m young and have fresh eyes, I can pick out tiny shells on the sea urchin. I wasn’t allowed to do the big stuff.”
Yu has since mastered the art of fish butchery. And the two retail locations flourished under the four main pillars of her business: wholesale, retail, ready-to-eat and selling commodity.
“Over the years, some pillars are stronger than others. Some pillars fall, like during COVID, one completely fell through, and that was wholesale. Suddenly the restaurants were not even allowed to be open. So I was very lucky to have these other pillars. I could move people from this dead pillar to the next pillar because our retail stores were so busy. It was a great year.”
During that time, Yu, who has an uncanny ability to spot trends and shifts in the market before they occur, decided to introduce more prepared meals in her stores using seafood from her family’s boats and from local fishermen. She began by offering a poke bowl but quickly noticed that there was always leftover rice.
“For a Chinese person, throwing rice away is the worst thing you can do, for your luck and for your ancestors,” she says.
To solve the problem of excess cooked rice, Yu reached out to chef Dez Lo and they developed a plan for what would be the beginning of the ready-to-eat line of frozen seafood products.
“We realized that there are really two ways to tackle leftover rice in the history of my culture — either fried rice or congee. I thought fried rice is great, but then I would need a hood fan and I didn’t want to buy a hood fan. So we thought, let’s make congee. But how could we make it stand out?”
She decided to use leftover halibut heads (after the cheeks were removed) to make an intense broth for the congee. As this was during COVID, Yu, who also has a knack for finding great staff, employed several chefs who had been laid off from the Shangri-La Hotel kitchens, all of whom had been making congee every day before the pandemic.
“Between them and Dez, they started my congee program. It just blew up. At first we were just scooping it up and selling it in the store,” and as demand grew, they started to sell packaged congee. “But then we wondered how we could do it better and started to sell it as frozen discs with the seafood on top, which really turned out well for all our soups.”
Since closing the two retail locations and setting up shop in the processing plant full time, Yu and her team have been able to grow their line of ready-to-eat products and are constantly testing out new ideas.
Leading the team is chef Welbert Choi, past executive chef at Forage, with a long history of championing local and sustainable seafood in Vancouver. As well as managing the packaging and distribution of their products, Choi is responsible for developing new recipes.
“All the pillars are fun in their own way,” Yu says. “But right now, our focus is selling value-added products to retailers. I think this is kind of our new era of the fish business.” She also began selling products from her family’s boat at Steveston Wharf last summer, having realized that she misses regular contact with customers.
Yu continues her mission to change B.C.’s relationship with local seafood. She’s active with several community organizations including as President of B.C.’s chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier; supporting B.C. Dive Fisheries Society and the annual Divers’ Catch Festival that focus on sustainable seafood such as geoduck, uni and sea urchin; and as a restaurant judge for the Chinese Restaurant Awards, Vancouver Magazine’s restaurant edition and Canada’s 100 Best.
However, the best part of Jenice Yu’s day is the time she spends tasting new recipes with her team and exploring ways to expand her “Asian flavour collection.”
“We just want to keep developing delicious products. We have such a great team; they have so much great knowledge and can bring together great flavours. We’re entering more grocery stores and tapping into chain grocery stores. That part is very exciting for us and Choi just created a sea urchin udon. Next on the list is something with sea cucumber and then geoduck.”
eatfish.ca | @eatfish.ca
