Ocean Beauty Seafoods says it has accepted an offer on the shuttered seafood processing plant on the Petersburg waterfront but is not identifying the buyer. The former cannery and seafood plant has been on the market for over a year. Recently the price was reduced on both that facility and a nearby bunkhouse for the plant workers.
Ocean Beauty’s chief financial officer Tony Ross says the company has accepted an offer for its waterfront processing plant but would not say who the buyer is or the timeline for completing the sale. The bunkhouse building is still for sale and the asking price for that is $1,295,000.
The initial asking price on both properties combined was $3,390,000. That was reduced this fall to $2,495,000 for both. The properties were listed in 2018 with the Carlton Smith Company, a commercial real estate firm in Juneau.
The processing plant is right in between two of Petersburg’s three harbors in the waterfront downtown. That 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 was struck by the state ferry Matunuska in 2012 and the state’s insurance company paid just under four million dollars to Ocean Beauty for damages and lost revenue from that season.
The cannery has not operated since 2016. It was closed down as the company turned its focused on fresh and frozen processing for salmon, which can be done at Ocean Beauty’s other plant at Excursion Inlet west of Juneau. When it was operating, the seafood processing plant employed about 200 seasonal workers.
So far no word yet on the buyer, with representatives of several seafood and cruise companies already operating in the region saying they are not involved.
