Zachary Scott is pleased to announce the recapitalization of its client, Northline Seafoods (“Northline” or the “Company”), in a combined debt and equity financing from a consortium of private investors. We appreciate the time and effort spent by the Northline management team: Ben Blakey, CEO, Drew Cohen, Chief Technical Officer, and the greater Northline team were instrumental in successfully navigating the transaction. We also appreciate the efforts of Carney Badley Spellman in Seattle for legal work supporting the transaction.
Situation
Zachary Scott has followed Northline’s journey from ideation to execution since its founding in 2017. Originally headquartered in Sitka, AK and now based out of Bellingham, WA, Northline was founded on the premise that the current processing paradigm for delivering wild Alaskan salmon to domestic markets was unsatisfactory; that by rearranging the time and place of preparing salmon for the market, a higher-quality product could be produced at a lower price.
Northline proposed that if salmon could be deeply and quickly frozen, in the round and on the fishing grounds, then the pristine salmon could be transported and preserved until the fish could be thawed and processed some months later just in time to meet market demand – a challenging enough technical undertaking on land, but especially challenging in the waters of Bristol Bay and at scale.
Northline brought its vision to life with a prototype floating freezing platform in 2019 and 2020, but lost the prototype platform to a freak weather accident after the 2020 salmon season had concluded. Armed with two years of data and process improvement, Northline went to work reimagining its operating model, and entrusted Zachary Scott to help arrange financing of Northline’s next phase of evolution. That process resulted in a 2022 recapitalization led by Greater Commercial Lending of Nevada, and was completed with the combined efforts of the team in 2024.
ZS Role
Zachary Scott worked on behalf of the Northline shareholders to recapitalize the business, placing a combination of debt and equity financing to finish Northline’s construction of the novel platform, fund operations, and provide a line of credit for managing in-season working capital needs.
Results
The freezing platform, christened the Hannah, finished construction operated in Bristol Bay during the 2024 salmon season, and is currently operating in Bellingham, producing high-quality salmon products for customers across the United States.
We are pleased to have contributed to furthering Northline’s vision of a reimagined value chain for wild Alaskan salmon. As the nationally recognized leader in seafood M&A in the Pacific Northwest for the last two decades, we view this transaction as a landmark achievement for our practice.