Ocean Beauty announced the permanent closure of its Petersburg facility in August. (Photo courtesy of Cindi Lagoudakis)
The Ocean Beauty Seafoods processing plant and bunk house in Petersburg are for sale. The asking price for those buildings and property owned by the company is $3,390,000.
The property is listed with the Carlton Smith Company, a commercial real estate company in Juneau. The processing plant is right in between two of Petersburg’s three harbors in the waterfront downtown.
In August Ocean Beauty president and CEO Mark Palmer informed the Petersburg borough that the company would be permanently closing the facility. The processor has invested money in its Excursion Inlet plant, about 40 miles west of Juneau, and is focusing on more fresh and frozen processing instead of canning fish.
The company declined to do an interview about putting the Petersburg property up for sale. The property includes three and quarter acres of industrial land. The processing plant has more that 65,000 square feet of building space. A nearby 13,000 square foot bunk house on Harbor Way was completed in 1999 and is also for sale.
The cannery building site was originally a steamship dock dating back to the early 1900s. It has housed other seafood companies for a good part of the last century and was bought by Chatham Straits Seafoods, a division of Ocean Beauty in the 1980s.
The cannery, one of two in the community, has not operated since 2016. It was also closed in 2010 and also in 2012, the year the state ferry Matanuska crashed into the building. That led to the state settling with the company for $3.9 million for the damages.
When it was operating, the seafood processing plant employed about 200 seasonal workers.
