Seafood is one of those industries people experience daily at a grocery case, a restaurant table, a family grill yet rarely think about as a career destination, especially for women. And that’s a missed story, because globally, women are a substantial part of the fisheries-and-aquaculture workforce (FAO estimates women are about 21–24% in primary production, and closer to ~50% across the full aquatic value chain, when pre- and post-harvest roles are included). But representation is at the top: a widely cited industry scan of the world’s top 100 seafood companies found women in executive-and-board roles reached 14% in 2020.
Against that backdrop, Pacific Seafood, a family-owned company founded in 1941 has been putting visible structure around training, promotion, and professional education as it scales. In its 2024 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report, Pacific Seafood describes Mission 31, a plan to double the size of its business by 2031, emphasizing growth “with responsibility,” and a workplace built around development opportunities. The report also frames the company’s footprint at 3,000+ team members and 40+ facilities, creating a wide runway for leadership roles from QA and operations to sales, marketing, sourcing, and compliance.
What follows is a look through a women-in-leadership lens at how a modern seafood company builds careers, what the internal “pipeline” can look like, and a few concrete examples of women leading inside Pacific Seafood today.
The Pipeline Is the Story: Training Systems Designed for Promotions
Leadership doesn’t appear by accident in a labor-tight, safety-intensive, compliance-heavy industry like seafood processing and distribution. It’s built deliberately through repeatable training, shared standards, and real authority on the floor.
Pacific Seafood’s CSR report is unusually specific about the mechanics of this. In 2024, the company recorded 10,102 hours of training, and highlighted a “Pacific Seafood University” with 1,000+ self-service training courses plus tools for performance reviews and annual goals. In practical terms, that’s a system designed to do two things well:
- Make skill-building accessible (especially to frontline teams who can’t easily leave operations for classroom time).
- Standardize leadership basics across regions and facilities, so “how we do things” travels with a new manager.
The report also spotlights leadership programming such as “Diamond Week,” “Team Blue,” and “Supervisory Basics,” and provides a simple but important detail: 40+ attendees participated (in 2024) in at least one highlighted development track. For women building careers in operations or QA roles that often require credibility earned on shift, not just on paper, formal training adds a powerful layer: it turns know-how into recognized readiness.
A Second Lever: Education Benefits That Turn Retention Into Momentum
Seafood careers are frequently learned through experience but credentials can matter when someone is stepping from supervisor to manager, or from QA lead to multi-site oversight.
Pacific Seafood’s CSR report notes a tuition grant program (via partner universities) with 18 team members enrolled since 2022. It also names individual participants, such as Melissa Moua (listed as a “future graduate”) a small detail that signals something larger: the company is trying to convert ambition into completion by lowering financial friction.
From a leadership perspective, tuition support does more than “upskill.” It can help women (and anyone) navigate the career jump points where confidence and credentialing often intersect: supply chain analytics, EHS management, food safety auditing, business administration, and people leadership.
What Leadership Looks Like in Practice: Three Roles Worth Watching
1) Operations leadership Traci Chidester’s promotion in Clackamas
Promotions tell you what a company values. In early 2021, Pacific Seafood announced that Traci Chidester was promoted from Retail Sales Manager to Assistant General Manager of Pacific Seafood Clackamas explicitly tying her new role to overseeing both sales and operations, and to focusing on talent development and changing customer needs.
That combination of commercial responsibility and operational authority is the profile of a modern GM track. In seafood, it often means mastering the tension between service levels, yield, food safety controls, labor planning, and the rhythms of perishability. It’s also a reminder that leadership pathways don’t have to start in one lane; they can start at the customer end and move inward to operations, which can be an especially powerful route for women who build reputations as problem-solvers and culture-setters.
2) Brand and Go-To-Market Leadership Kady Freeze and the “Retail Feedback Loo
Leadership isn’t only a plant story; it’s also the way a company presents trust to customers. In a 2025 Pacific Seafood announcement about a brand refresh (including packaging), Kady Freeze, identified as Marketing Brand Manager, emphasized retailer input shaping the refresh.
That line matters in a seafood context because packaging is where sustainability messaging, traceability cues, and product education meet. When marketing leadership is aligned with retail realities—how shoppers decide, what questions they ask, what “fresh” signals look like—it can directly support repeat purchasing and reduce confusion at the shelf. And for women leading in brand roles, it’s a place where cross-functional influence is real: packaging touches sourcing claims, QA labeling, regulatory review, and supply chain feasibility.
3) Legal and strategic affairs Elizabeth Bingold and the compliance backbone
Seafood companies live in a world of audits, certifications, international trade considerations, and evolving regulatory expectations. Pacific Seafood’s 2017 announcement that Elizabeth Bingold joined as Corporate Counsel places her inside the “Legal and Strategic Affairs” function overseeing legal, compliance, and risk management matters.
It’s an often invisible form of leadership less photogenic than a processing line, but foundational. Strong in-house counsel helps companies move faster and safer: contracting, certifications, governance, and responsible sourcing systems tend to be only as strong as the clarity and discipline behind them.
Culture Signals: Recognition, Feedback Loops, and “Employer of Choice” FramingRetail Feedback Loop
A leadership pipeline is only as durable as the culture it runs through. Pacific Seafood’s CSR report highlights a Top Workplace award streak (noting recognition over the past three years), presented in the context of team-member feedback and continuous improvement.
In operational businesses, feedback systems can be the difference between “we train people” and “we promote people.” When a company measures engagement and follows through, it increases the odds that mid-career women often balance shifting life responsibilities. They see management as a place where they can succeed, not just survive.
Why This Matters Beyond One Company
The women-in-leadership story in seafood is bigger than any single organization. The sector’s labor footprint is massive, and the world needs more people who can run safe plants, manage cold chain performance, build trusted sourcing programs, and communicate seafood’s health benefits credibly.
Pacific Seafood’s approach at least as described in its CSR reporting leans into a very pragmatic thesis: make leadership teachable (through a large internal training library and structured programs), make advancement visible (through named programs and metrics like training hours), and make education achievable (through tuition pathways).
That’s the kind of infrastructure that can move the needle for women’s leadership over time because it doesn’t require a single heroic narrative. It creates a repeatable system where more narratives can happen.
