Future of Fish

Who We Are | Swimming Upstream

  • Richard Boot : Fort Collins, Colorado

    Founder and president of FishChoice Inc., an online matching service for buyers and suppliers of sustainable fish

  • Jerry Knecht : Bali, Indonesia

    Founder and president of North Atlantic, Inc., a primary processor, importer, and distributor of fresh and frozen seafood, and sustainability pioneer

  • Barton Seaver : Washington, DC

    Chef, speaker, National Geographic Fellow, and author of the sustainable seafood cookbook For Cod and Country

  • Miguel Jorge : Washington, DC

    Director of the National Geographic Society’s Ocean Initiative working with an array of partners to restore ocean health and productivity

  • Ed Backus : Portland, Oregon

    Vice president of community ecosystem services at Ecotrust, and founder of the $6 million North Pacific Fisheries Trust

  • Dune Lankard : Cordova, Alaska

    Native Athabaskan Eyak fisherman from the Alaskan Copper River Delta and founder of Copper River Wild Salmon

  • Thomas Kraft : Seattle, Washington

    Founder of Norpac Fisheries Export, a successful processing and distribution business dedicated to accountability, responsibility, traceability & sustainability

  • Sean & Michael Dimin : Brooklyn, NY

    Founders of Sea to Table, a business that overnights fresh fish caught by small-scale sustainable fishermen around the world to top restaurants

  • Kristofor Lofgren : Portland, Oregon

    Ecopreneur and founder of the nation’s first MSC certified sustainable sushi restaurant, Bamboo Sushi

  • Village Fishmonger : New York, NY

    Founders of Village Fishmonger are in the process of launching a seafood retail business selling locally sourced sustainable seafood a la carte or by seasonal subscription.

  • Jared Auerbach : Boston, MA

    Owner and CEO of Red’s Best, an innovative technology and logistics platform that builds efficiency and traceability in order to support small fishing fleets and ensure maximum freshness.

  • Steve Vilnit : Annapolis, MD

    Director of Fisheries Marketing at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, a state-run program that helps watermen increase the value of their harvest through grassroots marketing efforts.

  • Robert Terry : Palo Alto, CA / Newport, OR

    Founder and CTO of Smart Catch LLC, a startup that‘s developing cost-effective, innovative trawl-net fishing gear that will help fishermen increase efficiency and reduce by-catch.

  • Shannon McDiarmid : San Francisco, CA

    President and Director of Safety & Sustainability at Royal Hawaiian Seafood, a premiere Bay Area seafood distributor focused on high-caliber and responsibly produced fresh and live seafood.

Jared Auerbach

Jared is the CEO and owner of Red’s Best. Throughout his 9 years experience in the seafood industry, Jared has held positions in every aspect of the supply chain including three years as a commercial fisherman in Alaska and New England. He started Red’s Best in 2008 and has grown it from scratch.

How did you come to create Red’s Best?
We set out with a goal to efficiently unload a large quantity of small boats, which we believe is the best type of fishing for the environment, the community, and the quality of the product.  The problem was keeping up with the paperwork and compliance when dealing with so many transactions on a daily basis.  This led to the creation of proprietary, web-based software that starts at the point of landing and streamlines the back end of distributing this fish.  Once our information was digital it opened up a whole new world of front end tools to add value to the product on the sales and marketing side.  

How does Red’s Best support sustainable fishing?
We are building the supply side to the increasing demand for local, traceable, sustainable, top-quality seafood. We are committed to preserving the small-boat fishing communities in the United States. By nature, these small fleets have less impact on the environment and are good for their local communities - both economically and emotionally.

What differentiates you from your competition?
Our competition is very old fashioned. They are good at what they do, but at the end of the day their only competitive advantage is hard work and money. Our competitive advantage is in our personal relationships and forward thinking.

What are some of your goals for the near future?
Continue to grow our three current unloading/processing facilities. Build on and implement some of our demand-side plug-ins. Grow our network of fishermen and the items we can offer. Start integrating more franchises into our current organization.

What’s your plan for accomplishing these goals?
First, we need to figure out how to efficiently unload a large quantity of boats that are catching a small quantity of fish. We have created proprietary software that makes this possible because of the efficiencies it creates on the backend and the added value it creates on the frontend. The added value on the frontend is in the form of traceability tools and plug-ins that provide deeper penetration into the supply chain.

What do you hope to gain as a Future of Fish member?
A network of like-minded people.