BusinessTN

Bob Wilson has bigger fish to fry. Not that the Queens, N.Y., native who built a successful seafood delivery business in Nashville would put it that way—he hates fish-related puns in the media.

Then again, during a conversation at Seafood System’s nondescript warehouse near Nashville International Airport—in an office awash with seafood themes and fishing rods in the corner—he catches himself before he makes another seafood pun. It’s hard to avoid. Wilson’s life is filled with aquatic fare, and thanks to his company’s planned $20 million investment at the Nashville International Airport, the city’s skies soon could be, too.

The idea for Seafood Systems, which Wilson started in 1999 with former chef and partner Richard Walker, had been in development for nearly a decade. “I came to Nashville in 1985, and it was just meat and potatoes,” Wilson says. Due in part to the patented delivery system he developed, Middle Tennessee’s seafood palate has since changed dramatically.

With his five trucks, each with a swordfish logo emblazoned on the side, Wilson purveys fresh fish on a daily basis to top seafood restaurants in the area, including Merchants, Zola, and those at Gaylord’s Opryland Hotel. Seafood Systems moves 30,000 pounds of salmon a week alone, 11,000 pounds of which goes to O’Charley’s restaurants in 28 states. Such customers enabled Seafood Systems to break even its first complete year in business and to make $6 million in sales in 2003.

Upon arrival of the high-tech truck, restaurant chefs around Nashville climb into its cargo space, outfitted with refrigeration and sanitation equipment, to hand-select seafood they need for the evening. The truck drivers, mostly former chefs themselves, cut the fish in front of their customers and log all the data into an on-board laptop that communicates with the company’s central database. Every ounce of seafood, every degree change and every penny get recorded to eliminate waste and allow for better accountability.

“Wilson’s company is one of the two fishmongers I deal with, and he’s the most qual- ified and most professional,” says a Midstate chef who calls the delivery truck “Das Boot” for its shiny metal panels and the military discipline of the operation.

For his part, Wilson says he has no choice but to run a tight ship because margins in the business already are slim and “gasoline costs are so staggeringly out of hand.” Helped by the close proximity to the airport, Wilson’s employees meet three or four commercial airplanes a day that deliver in their cargo compartments all manner of seafood (120 items, to be exact) from the coasts of Chile, Costa Rica, Canada, Alaska and Louisiana. Then pallets of fish are moved to Seafood Systems’ 25,000 square-foot warehouse, where the fish are prepared for the trucks. The company pretty much knows its orders in advance, adjusting for Mother’s Day and Parent’s Day at Vanderbilt University, which minimizes shortage or overstock problems.

For some types of seafood, Wilson sends a big rig to Louisiana a couple times a week, timing the truck’s arrival at the bay with the schedule of the boat. Such steps allow Wilson to cut the time from the seafood’s harvest till it ends up on the plate to four days. Some of Wilson’s competitors take up to eight days to deliver the same types of fish. There are, of course, overnight shipping services, but restaurants can’t afford to use them on a daily basis.

Proximity to the Nashville airport helps to explain Wilson’s next project. While he and his three partners didn’t tap venture capital funds to start Seafood Systems, they are now looking for as much as $20 million in funding to build the so-called Nashville Perishable Link, a 50,000 square-foot airport ramp featuring five refrigeration units. Serving as a centralized port of entry for sea- food, flowers and produce, the facility would become the FedEx of perishable goods, competing with a convoluted network of hundreds of independent dealers nationwide.

Working on this project with the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, Wilson says the new venture would allow, for example, “to deliver salmon to Chicago within three days from the point of harvest, which is currently unheard of.” While the exact profits Seafood Systems can expect to reap from the endeavor are impossible to determine just yet, one thing’s for certain: that’s a whole lot of clams.