Why are there two seafood plants in the small Minnesota town of Motley?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

In the middle of Minnesota, where the long arm of Hwy. 10 crooks from north to west in Motley, there’s no missing the two seafood plants at the edge of town.

There’s Morey’s Seafood — with its giant fish sign — and Trident Seafoods next door. But why are they here, so far from any ocean?

That’s what Jon Beck has been wondering, ever since driving through Motley on a trip up to Itasca State Park a few years ago.

He reached out to Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project, for an answer.

“I noticed the Trident Seafood logo — I recognized it from my years of watching [the Discovery Channel show] ‘Deadliest Catch.‘“ Beck said. ”I surmised they weren’t processing king crab in Motley, so I wondered what it was, way out in central Minnesota.”

Indeed it isn’t king crab; the plant actually processes millions of pounds of imitation crab.

Today, between Morey’s and Trident, more than 500 people work in the seafood business in Motley. The industry has an origin story that stretches back nearly a century and has the air of Minnesota mythology.

As the story goes, it all began when a Motley man named Ed Morey made a trade: a crate of corn for a load of fish.

Loren Morey, Ed’s son and eventual business partner, recently recounted how his dad got started: One summer day in 1937, commercial fisherman Frank McGuire was driving south from Lake of the Woods to sell his ice-packed walleye in the Twin Cities.

His truck broke down in Motley, and he realized that the ice would melt and the fish would spoil before he could get it fixed.

Ed Morey, then a 28-year-old local logger and farmer with an enterprising streak, offered a crate of corn for McGuire’s fish. Morey then quickly sold the catch in nearby Little Falls.

“He actually got money for them, and he looked at that and said, ‘Gosh, I got enough money, I could get up to Baudette and get some more fish and maybe I could do this again,‘“ said Loren Morey.

“He got up there and got some more fish and started peddling the fish,” he said. “And the rest is history.”

After deciding to go all-in on the fish business, Ed Morey started smoking fish in 1938.

“He said, ‘Now, if I can sell a fresh fish, maybe if I cooked or smoked or did something with it, I could get a little more money out of it,” Loren Morey recalled. “That was our main focus here for a long time, smoked fish.”

Trouble was, Ed Morey burned down his tiny smokehouse the first time he tried. He got it right the second time though, his son said.

After a few successful years smoking whitefish and cisco (also called lake herring or tullibee), Morey grew interested in Alaskan salmon. At one point, he took the family to a remote fishing village on the Kenai Peninsula.

“He was an adventurous guy,” Morey’s son said — and a shrewd businessman. “He would always find somebody, someplace, that connected with something else.”

In 1947, Morey built the first small part of the company headquarters alongside Hwy. 10 (where it still stands) and added smoked salmon to the repertoire.

Morey’s would amass a regional following in the decades that followed for its smoked fish, especially smoked salmon. They sold it at their own retail shop in Motley and at an increasing number of grocery stores.

By the 1960s the Minneapolis Star called Morey’s “the state’s largest smoker,” sourcing fish from “both oceans, the gulf, Canadian lakes and Hudson Bay.”

In 1964, Loren Morey joined the family business after graduating from Hamline University and serving in the Navy. In the years that followed, Morey’s ramped up distribution and grew from a dozen employees to more than 100 in 1979, when Minneapolis-based International Multifoods bought the company.

Ed Morey retired the same year. When he died in 1987, Motley City Council Member Bob Rittenhouse remarked in an obituary: “Without Morey’s, Motley would be in tough shape. We might be fading away like a lot of small towns.”

Ed Morey was serious about work, a “pusher,” his son recalled: “You gotta push. You gotta continue to make relationships, and you gotta continue to make good products, and you gotta keep treating people right and enjoy the fruits of it all.”

But it was Loren Morey who successfully pushed for construction in landlocked Motley of what would become North America’s largest plant producing surimi, or imitation crab.

Loren Morey learned about surimi, a processed mixture of white fish (like pollock) and additives marketed as imitation crab, while serving as president of the National Fisheries Institute in 1984.

“I had a dream at that point,” he said. “We had 300 people living in Motley, or something like that. And I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if I could build a business that would employ 300 people?’”

The surimi plant opened in 1987 and began selling imitation crab to restaurants like Taco Bell and to grocery stores.

The surimi plant — originally named SeaFest — has changed hands several times, from Multifoods to Tyson to Conagra to Seattle-based Trident, which bought it in 2006. Today it can produce 100 million pounds of surimi annually.

Morey watched how the plant changed the fortunes of many Motley families.

“There was a home owned by a mechanic working for us. Pretty soon they built a porch on their house, and then they built a bigger one,” Morey said, choking up. “I think about that often when I go by there and say, ‘Hey, I started that.’”

In recent decades, Morey’s scaled back its offerings and honed its focus on salmon and a few other fish. The company got out of the wholesale lake fish business in 1996 to focus on more profitable products.

“It was an emotional issue. ... It was hard to abandon markets [in which] you’d spent your life,” co-owner Bill Frank told the Star Tribune at the time. Along with his son Steve Frank and Loren Morey, Frank had bought Morey’s from Multifoods in 1986.

Bill Frank was a longtime Twin Cities seafood broker who first met Ed Morey driving trucks for his family’s frozen food business in the 1940s. Before becoming an owner, he sold salmon and other fish to Morey’s to process for many years.

In 1996, the Morey’s retail shops in Motley and Baxter went to the Frank family, which still runs them today.

“We’re four generations deep in affiliations with Morey’s now,” Steve Frank said.

When he died in January 2024, Bill Frank was remembered by the National Fisheries Institute as “a legendary force in the seafood industry” who was essential in growing Morey’s.

The Plymouth-based fish distribution business Eddie M’s also traces its roots to Morey’s.

As Morey’s marinated salmon gained popularity at retailers like Costco and Sam’s Club, the company phased out its once-famed smoked fish business.

“The marinated products business had really taken off,” said plant manager Ron Denning. “We’re continuing to go through tremendous growth.”

In 2020, Rich Products Corp. bought Morey’s Seafood International from a Chicago-based investment firm. A stark red Rich’s sign went up below the famed fish statue outside Morey’s HQ in Motley.

History, however, is still a key part of the brand.

The last time Morey visited a Costco, he picked up a box of Morey’s salmon.

“They had changed the look of the box a little bit. I took the box and turned it over,” he said. “There was a picture of myself and dad on the box. Dad and I standing there with smoked fish.”

If you’d like to submit a Curious Minnesota question, fill out the form below:

Read more Curious Minnesota stories:

How did Old Dutch potato chips get started in St. Paul?

Did Bundt cake originate in Minnesota?

How did Minnesota become the nation’s top turkey state?

Why did Spam become an international sensation?

Minnesota is a top corn producer. But how much of it is eaten by humans?

How the heck did Minnesota end up with a state muffin?