"I was not a huge tinned fish person," Becca Millstein, co-founder of the canned-fish direct-to-consumer startup Fishwife told me over a Zoom call from the brand's sun-soaked Los Angeles headquarters. The company shares its workspace with another startup, Jing Gao's flourishing Sichuan sauce, spice, and dumpling brand Fly By Jing, and the pair just collaborated on a limited-edition can of smoked, Arctic-raised Atlantic salmon dressed with Gao's Sichuan Chili Crisp.
While studying abroad in Spain, Millstein grew smitten with "this insanely beautiful culture around tinned fish." She marveled at the brick-and-mortor storefronts (after which Fishwife HQ may well be modeled), and, perhaps more foretelling, at how the Mediterranean staple just wasn't something she'd encountered at home in the US.
Years later, Millstein (then a community manager at an art gallery) and her friend and future Fishwife co-founder Caroline Goldfarb found themselves homebound during a pandemic and subsisting heavily on tinned fish. After some querying, they found that they weren't the only ones in their friend group turning to tinned seafood. "Now," Millstein said, "if a natural wine store is going to have a product that's not wine, it's tinned fish."
But while she noticed century-old European legacy brands like Olasagasti and Nuri showing up on US grocery store shelves more and more, she wasn't seeing any American tinned fish leading the charge.
"For such a staple, there are so few categories that have had no new entries in the past 100 years. On that alone, I was ready to go," Millstein told me. "The first day Caroline [Goldfarb] and I came up with the idea, we called 20 friends and one person thought we were a little bit crazy, but everyone thought this was so obvious. From the beginning I felt basically one hundred percent confident."
'I wanted to make products that were undeniable'"The first year was transparently just a lot of instinct," Millstein said.
Becca Millstein
Rather than launch with a cornucopia of products, Fishwife took a simplistic approach: Start with Arctic-farm-raised Smoked Atlantic Salmon, Idaho-farm-raised Smoked Rainbow Trout, and Pacific-Northwest, hook-and-line-caught Smoked Albacore Tuna — basic staples within the realm of canned fish.
"I was not creating extremely complex recipes, just simple, classic, smoked fish," Millstein said. "I was dialing smoke time, brine time, up and down and finding what tasted delicious and something you wanted to crack open another can after."
"From a business perspective, it's shelf-stable, completely unprocessed, a clean label, really healthy, and ready to eat straight out of the can, and convenience, health, shelf stability, obviously during covid that was very top of mind."
Fishwife's distinct, whimsical aesthetic has also helped the brand stand out in today's Instagram-centric food startup landscape. Far from the spartan Brunswick and Bumblebee labels many of us are familiar with, the bold packaging illustrated with topless mermaids and fish puffing on pipes had my dinner guests ogling the boxes, and even enticed a few who had been reticent about attending an 'evening of tinned-fish tasting.'
A little salty, a little sweet"Looking at the package, you want to eat this even if you don't like fish," a dinner guest told me, after inspecting a tin of Fishwife the other night.
Owen Burke/Insider
Fishwife may have fanciful packaging, but it goes for straightforward recipes and ingredients (lemon, olive oil) that should suit most any palate and are neutral enough to work in an array of dishes.
"With fish, you just want to make the fish sing and not silence them with too many wild ingredients. Things will not be getting terribly complicated because we want to keep it quite simple: A little salty, a little sweet," Millstein says of the brand's wares. "Americans love those flavor notes, as opposed to the pervading flavors you see out of Europe, like escabeche and vinegar-based recipes."
Salmon, trout, and albacore are among the more ubiquitous species you'll find tinned anywhere, which keeps the brand's inventory basic enough to appease the masses, but those looking for something a little different should keep their eye on Fishwife, too: Millstein hinted, more than once, at a wide array of species she's been experimenting with preserving and canning that might suit more adventurous taste buds.
What's next for Fishwife"Where we can come in because we're a tinned company, where other formats do not work, is exciting."
Fly By Jing
"The format of tinned allows people to totally bypass the preparation process of seafood and introduce people to new species," says Millstein, positing that many if not most people don't want to bring raw oysters or mussels into the house. "But if we can get them in a can and get people eating really healthy, sustainable products, that would be a huge win for us."
Through building customer trust early on with salmon, trout, and albacore — what Millstein and Goldfarb call "easy-to-love" fish — Millstein hopes to introduce "more species that are more outside of what is customary."
She's particularly excited at the prospect of one largely untapped market: "If we can bring in invasive species — there are invasive species with which we could have a scalable product — we'd love to dive down the zombie urchin tunnel," referring to a recent flux of malnourished sea urchins off the central California coast.
"Where we can come in because we're a tinned company, where other formats do not work, is exciting."
A sea of choicesFor now, Fishwife carries (and prides itself on) a modest selection of products, but Millstein assures us that there's more to come.
Owen Burke/Insider
Fishwife's tins are not the cheapest, but you'll find the brand on shelves next to high-end European labels, which is precisely where it belongs.
Trite as it may be, the adage 'you vote with your dollar' bears a particular weight when it comes to procuring seafood. Fishwife is among the few US-based brands working with heritage canneries in Washington State and British Columbia selling conscientiously-sourced fish (and soon, shellfish) on a national scale. At a time when the nefarious provenance of cheap seafood is coming under more scrutiny, buying responsibly is beginning to weigh on more and more of us.
Smoked Atlantic Salmon: Skin-on, this salmon, raised in deep, Arctic currents, is traceable "from egg to tin." Smoked with maple, beech, and birch, it sits on the sweeter, smokier side and is perfectly at home atop a salad, rice, or any other grain (preferably adorned with avocado). It's also every bit as enjoyable atop a cracker or piece of toast.
Wild-Caught Smoked Albacore Tuna: Far from the dry, mass-processed "chicken of the sea" of yore, this is a richer, bolder, but still versatile take. It's not meant to be simply relegated to a bath of mayonnaise, but pedestaled atop greens, a square of toast, or just about anywhere else you please.
Smoked Rainbow Trout: Idaho-raised, this hormone- and antibiotic-free fish comes in a pleasantly sweet brine of brown sugar, and garlic and is canned in extra virgin olive oil.
Smoked Salmon with Fly By Jing Sichuan Chili Crisp: While you could easily buy smoked salmon and doctor it up with Fly By Jing's Sichuan Chili Crisp, this limited-edition tin enables longterm marination that permeates the salmon in a way you'll probably never achieve on your own.
The Smoky Trio: A tin of each of Fishwife's preparations, this is a sample of smoked salmon, smoked rainbow trout, and smoked albacore tuna, and an easy introduction to the brand, or tinned fish in general.
