Tide to Table delivery arrives in Central Okanagan, offering delicious Walcan seafood

Fresh fish from the West Coast now has a direct route to your stomach in the Okanagan, largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Family-owned Walcan Seafood, which is located on Quadra Island, is now delivering its mouth-watering products once a week to the Central Okanagan. It all started back in March 2020, when the pandemic sent international markets into a tailspin and left a lot of freshly frozen fish in the company’s freezers.

Walcan sales manager Grant McNeil and the rest of the team did what they had to do: They hopped in their trucks and started delivering their salmon, spot prawns and other delectable seafood products to individual homes.

A new revenue stream, called Tide to Table, was born.

“We decided to create a website for people to place orders, and we would do twice-a-week deliveries of frozen, single-serving portions and packaged wild seafood,” McNeil says. “So we launched with some sockeye salmon and some spot prawns and some albacore tuna loins that we had already. We did that in May of 2020.”

They say necessity is the mother of invention. That was certainly the case for Tide to Table, whose location on the Inside Passage seaway between Vancouver Island and the mainland allows it to offer some of the freshest seafood on the planet.

“Since then it has exploded in popularity and where we can deliver,” McNeil says. “We expanded all throughout Vancouver Island, including to Victoria by Labour Day 2020. By the following spring, we were in Vancouver. And just a couple of months ago, we were able to secure a delivery partner in the Lower Mainland that has once-a-week deliveries to Kelowna.”

That’s right. Every Thursday a truck will roll into the Central Okanagan carrying delicious Walcan seafood, which can be on your dinner plate in no time. Deliveries are available in Kelowna, West Kelowna and Lake Country, and Tide to Table hopes to soon add Kamloops and Penticton to its list of destinations.

Walcan Seafood is the world’s largest spot prawn producer, and everything it offers—with the exception of farmed scallops from a nearby First Nation—is fresh out of the ocean from independent fishers. It is frozen right away to lock in the freshness, and it arrives that way at your door.

“If you take the vessel a good hour to three hours north of us, you’re in some signature fishing grounds for the best wild salmon, especially sockeye, in the world,” McNeil says.

Brandon Pirie, who is the son of Walcan founder Bill Pirie and brother of current president Cam Pirie, just so happens to be a Red Seal chef. He has returned to Quadra Island and lends his tasty talents to the family business.

“We’ve utilized his expertise to create a few marinated and what we call value-added products, specifically with his kind of signature recipes, which are fantastic,” McNeil says. “So it’s not just portions of fish that have been fresh frozen and wild caught before that, but we also have some fantastic, sometimes Asian-fusion-type recipes that our very own chef Brandon has created.”

You can place your Tide to Table order by visiting its website here.

This article is written by or on behalf of the sponsoring client and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.