And like small-scale meat processing, small-scale seafood requires infrastructure. Larsen says that finding the consistent means to process a small quantity of local fish wasn’t easy in the early days, when she started off dropping off fewer than 100 pounds of fish a week. Now Siren has around 500 subscribers in a handful of drop off locations (plus around 150 orders per week from the online local food market Good Eggs), which works out 600-700 pounds of seafood per week. It’s enough to make processing and distribution smoother, but, it’s still, Larsen admits, a drop in the bucket.

“Last year we channeled $150,000 straight to fishermen,” says Larsen. “I felt really good about that and then realized it was only .001% of the total spent in seafood in the Bay Area alone.”

With this desire to scale up in mind, Larsen is launching a value-added product line. “With seafood, value-added can mean as little as freezing and vacuum-packing a filet,” she says. And that’s exactly where Larsen is planning to start. After all, frozen seafood is a sustainable option if it’s done right.

Beginning this fall, Siren will begin selling, local salmon filets frozen on the day they are caught. “On the packaging we’re going to call out the boat that caught it, the date it was caught, and the location,” says Larsen.

Because she is raising a young son while running her business, Larsen says she hopes to reach those for whom multiple trips to buy groceries and pick up local food is not impossible.

“Before I had a child, I could pick up my CSA, pick up my meat share, go get eggs at that little place I liked down the road, etc. Now, I’m that convenience shopper I’d always heard about. But my food ethics haven’t gone anywhere–I still want to buy local and know where my food comes from,” she says. “And if I’m going to remember to should thaw something out for dinner, I don’t want it to be farm-raised tilapia from Vietnam.”

Larsen, has also been educating her members in seemingly small but meaningful ways for years. Case in point: Her emails to members are full of logistics, changes in plans, and seasonal updates. Unlike many business owners, Larsen lets them in on the process, and doesn’t shy away from sharing the challenges behind her work, in a way that actually involves them in what it means to procure local fish. (Full disclosure: The author is a long-time member). By creating a product that brings this kind of transparency to the grocery store, she hopes to widen the conversation seafood as part of a local food system.

The goal, she adds, is to teach people who are buying fish which questions to ask, and arming them with a little bit of knowledge, to make them feel confident in the process.

“If everybody at the fish counter asked, ‘where did this come from?’ and ‘how was it caught?,’ it would be a huge nudge for retailers,” she says. “And the follow-up question should be ‘where was it processed?’”

Photo at top: Anna Larsen with Scott Zahl of Cove Mussel Farm taken by James Collier.