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Made in Bellingham: Trans-Ocean''s faux crab: company has grown from $3 million a year in sales to more than $40 million in 2002.

Article Excerpt
There's no way around it--factory work is not easy. Spending eight hours per day in a noisy warehouse processing fish products is difficult work.

Rick Dutton, president of Trans-Ocean Products on Orchard Street in Bellingham, understands this fact and has done everything he can to try to make the work for his employees as interesting and worthwhile as possible--and in the process, he has grown the company from sales of $3 million per year in 1985 to more than $40 million last year.

Trans-Ocean Products, which produces imitation crab and other fish products, was established in 1985 as a small seafood processing company at Bellingham Cold Storage on the waterfront.. Dutton was the first employee.

"We started with 10,000 square feet, but quickly outgrew that facility," Dutton said.

In the early years, the company was bringing in about $3 million to $4 million in sales, but in 1989, Bellingham Cold Storage built the company a new 52,000-square-foot facility on West Orchard Drive, a plant that now has 184 full-time employees, most of whom work on the fish processing floor, and a capacity to produce more than 150,000 pounds of imitation crab, lobster or other fish product per day.

The raw material for making the product is "surimi," a processed fish product typically...

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