Northport, Alabama, U.S.A.-based Harvest Select nearly closed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Facing a shortage of employees and an upside-down market for its channel catfish, the company struggled to find a path forward, Harvest Select CEO Randy Rhodes told SeafoodSource at the 2023 Seafood Expo North America.
“I don’t give up to easy, I don’t think I’ve ever given up – I always fight back,” Rhodes said. “It was so uncertain, we didn’t know what we were thinking, we didn’t understand it. We were trying to be very cautious, and we protected our employees as best as we could."
Rhodes said some of the company's best employees – mostly older employees who had been with the company for decades – left out of concern for their safety, and were difficult to replace.
“We had one guy that was retiring in three months. He had planned on retiring for a couple of years, and ... [we were] facing this unknown challenge,’” Rhodes said. “I asked him, ‘Do you want to go ahead and retire now instead of sticking around and taking the chance of getting sick?’ I wanted him to retire on his own time. He’d been working with me for 40 years. It was a tough call, but it was good for him – I didn’t want him to get unhealthy.”
The company eventually found a comfortable balance between safety and productivity, according to Rhodes, but labor shortages became acute at times. Harvest Select operates in some of the poorest and most-rural counties in Alabama, which Rhodes said exacerbated its labor challenges. Additionally,
“In the last two years, we’ve had to schedule when we’re going to deliver and pick up product a lot different[ly] than in the past. In the past, you could call and say ‘Hey, I’m coming tomorrow,’ or ‘Hey, we’re coming tonight,’” Rhodes said. “In the last two years, or more, we’ve had to say, ‘We’ll be there in two days or three days.’”
In the end, Harvest Select's survival hinged on a few critical business decisions ...
Photo by Chris Chase/SeafoodSource
