The Salmon Industry Tries a New Line to Hook Buyers : Seafood: With few new customers biting on traditional canned version, Seattle seafood maker will introduce package patties.

The average buyer of canned salmon is 55 years old, says Michael Selders, vice president of sales and marketing at Peter Pan Seafoods Inc. It’s a figure that worries him, because it shows that young people are not buying his industry’s traditional product. And that worries him because the industry’s bread-and-butter fish is in abundant supply.

Salmon may be disappearing from the Columbia River and Puget Sound, but they are not disappearing from the net pens of Norway and Chile, and they are swarming to Alaska in record runs.

Prices are down, inventories up. The industry has to find more ways to get people to eat its product.

Peter Pan has been in the salmon business since 1914. It was named, so the story goes, when the CEO was taken by the Broadway hit musical of the same name. The company is now owned by a Japanese producer, Nichiro, and its brand of frozen sockeye is No. 1 in Japan. But in the branded consumer market in the United States, the company has only an artificial crab leg product and its traditional canned salmon.

Should it produce a fancy frozen dinner: salmon in pesto sauce on rice pilaf, with a side of thumb-size carrots?

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Peter Pan isn’t set up for that kind of product. Its plant in Algona, in south King County, which has 110 employees, mainly packs fish steaks and fillets for the restaurant trade. It is trying its first products made of surimi (minced pollock)--an imitation crab cake and a surimi-and-jalapeno bar snack. But these are also for the institutional trade and aren’t packaged for sale in supermarkets.

The new salmon product has to be simple. A can is simple. But today’s fastidious buyer opens the can and sees oil, a bit of skin and even bones--soft bones that are a tremendous source of calcium, Selders says, but bones nevertheless. Today’s buyer doesn’t want bones. More crucial, today’s buyer doesn’t know what to do with a can of salmon. “It’s not a convenient product,” he says.

Selders’ solution: the salmon patty.

Those under 55 might reply: The what? You mean the salmon burger? No, says Selders. “We thought about that for awhile, but I don’t think people relate. If they want a burger, they want a hamburger. What are salmon burgers? My mom never made them. To be honest, a lot of them aren’t very good.”

The salmon patty is a traditional American dish: canned salmon mixed with corn meal, crackers and bread crumbs, some chopped onion, egg whites, a dab of mayonnaise, a bit of garlic, salt and pepper. You stir the ingredients, make a patty and fry it.

“My mom used to make them every Friday,” Selders says. But that was back when people were willing to open cans--and they stocked things like corn meal.

The solution? The prepackaged salmon patty.

So far, Peter Pan has tried three recipes: 70% salmon, 50% and 30%. All use pre-cooked fish, which makes a soft patty with the distinctive taste of canned salmon. Some say the 70% and even the 50% version are too fishy, because the patties remembered by people born in hard times contained a lot of corn meal.

The heartland of the salmon patty was the South, and it is there--in Georgia and the Carolinas--that the company plans to roll out its new product.

How to package it? Selders isn’t sure.

Maybe a plastic-foam tray, the way hamburger is sold. Or in a freezer-compartment tub with a label just like the cans. However it is packaged, the cost would have to be no higher than canned salmon. “This is not a high-end product,” he says.

Rollout of the Peter Pan salmon patty is three to four months away, Selders says. In that time, he intends to solve the last major technical problem: making the new-age patty survive a microwave without turning rubbery.