$280M project would expand seafood company’s operations in Tacoma. Here’s what we know
A local seafood company has big plans for a new facility at the Port of Tacoma.
Details have emerged of Tacoma-based Fathom Seafood’s plans for a new 550,000-square-foot cold storage and processing facility at a cost of $280 million.
Fathom CEO Cody Mills recently discussed the plans in an interview with The News Tribune.
Fathom is involved in live seafood, processing and distribution with a workforce of about 168 employees, according to Mills. The company is joining forces with New Jersey-based private equity investor Saxum Real Estate and Development in its latest venture.
According to Mills, the plans propose 450,000 square feet of cold storage, “for all food, not just seafood,” and more than 100,000 square feet of automated processing for seafood. The site would include two buildings, with a rail dock between the two, and construction taking place in phases.
“We are at kind of the final push of negotiations with the Port of Tacoma for the ground lease,” Mills told The News Tribune. The port property, roughly bordered by Alexander Avenue, East 11th Street and Taylor Way, is 30 acres total.
“We’re going to take our two current (seafood) plants and aggregate them into this facility and then expand it all at the same time,” Mills said.
The proposal calls for the site to operate as “a third-party facility, so it’s third-party logistics and third-party processing,” Mills told The News Tribune. “The idea is to basically build this massive tool that people get to use in our industry and in the food industry as well. ... This is a food facility for all food that specifically services all of the agricultural and seafood needs for cold storage for the Northwest.”
He noted it would be a multi-temp facility, “which means that we have a bunch of chambers in the facility, and every chamber can change from refrigerated temperatures all the way down to ultra low temp storage.”
“There isn’t any public ultra low temp cold storage that’s at any kind of scale. So that’s what we’re building,” he added.
He foresees the site creating hundreds of jobs with the full build-out. To help in the development, Fathom recently brought on Domenic Prinzivalli as senior vice president, strategy and operations.
Prinzivalli at one time served as Amazon’s head of global operation services, and was tied to the company’s early robotics research, according to a recent LinkedIn post. In the post, he wrote: “Today, I’m looking forward to leveraging this experience to transform the seafood supply chain at Fathom Seafood—improving quality, worker safety, and productivity through advanced robotics and automation.”
“He’s going to bring a lot of higher tech industrial knowledge base down into our facility,” Mills told The News Tribune.
Negotiations and tariff pressures
Port of Tacoma communications office said in an emailed statement in response to questions from The News Tribune that the port “is still in the process of negotiating a potential lease of port-owned property for a seafood cold storage processing facility. At this time, we’re unable to share any details.”
The statement added, “If both parties come to an agreement, information will be available when a lease is presented to Port of Tacoma Commissioners for their consideration at a future commission meeting.”
Mills said, “The goal is to break ground this summer on the dirt work part, while we’re still working on the building permit. Then we get the building permit, and then we’ll try and take keys on the facility by the end of ‘26,” for the first phase, and then “take the keys” on the second phase the following year.
Matthew Wassel is a principal with Saxum Real Estate and Development. In response to questions from The News Tribune, Wassel said via email that this would be Saxum’s first project in Tacoma.
“Saxum has been speaking with Cody and his team for several years about potential projects in the region,” he wrote.
Times have evolved for Mills and the company, which was founded in 2016 with the purchase of Alaska Ice Seafoods. In 2019, Mills told The News Tribune he had deep concerns about China tariffs placed on geoducks and how that was roiling the Alaska Ice brand.
“We’re still dealing with that,” he said this week. And now, a new round of U.S.-based tariffs has Mills more focused than ever on getting this latest expansion up and running, and is actively promoting it as a positive for the surrounding region both with the seafood processing and food storage capabilities.
“This business idea came about before this new tariff war,” he said.
“This is massive for food security in the Northwest,” he added. “Being an anchor in the food supply chain, you know, for Tacoma, is critically important, in our opinion.”
“This isn’t like another mega warehouse being built down next to somebody’s housing development,” he noted. “We’re actually where it should be, in the middle of the commerce zone, and that’s pretty cool.”
This story was originally published April 2, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
