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October 27-28, 2023
Southern Foodways Symposium ⟶
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October 27-28, 2023
Southern Foodways Symposium ⟶

Oral Histories

The SFA oral history program documents life stories from the American South. Collecting these stories, we honor the people whose labor defines the region. If you would like to contribute to SFA’s oral history collections, please send your ideas for oral history along with your CV or Resume and a portfolio of prior oral history work to info@southernfoodways.org.

< Back to Oral History project: Saltwater South: Forgotten Coast

ORAL HISTORY

Steven Rash

Water Street Seafood

Steven Rash was born in Missouri in 1960. He was raised throughout the United States, but his family moved Tallahassee, Florida when he was in high school. Rash fished and ate seafood at St. George Island because of its close proximity to Tallahassee. While attending Florida State University, a friend from New York mentioned that restaurants in the city would pay top dollar for Gulf shrimp. Rash and his friends decided to buy shrimp from Apalachicola and ship it up north. Rash also began selling Gulf shrimp in Tallahassee. His lucrative side project soon bloomed into a full-time business.

Hurricane Kate devastated Florida’s Forgotten Coast in 1985, and Rash decided to move his seafood business to Apalachicola. Water Street Seafood buys fresh seafood caught in the Gulf Coast. They are the largest distributor of seafood in North Florida. They sell fresh and frozen seafood in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. They also ship seafood via UPS and FedEx throughout the United States.

Date of interview:
2021-10-21

Interviewer:
Annemarie Anderson

Photographer:
Annemarie Anderson

Download Transcript

“

“We’ve adapted here to a lot of different types of products, selling a lot of frozen seafood and stuff like that, which isn’t what we set out to do, but we had to change and go with the flow, so to speak. But when we do that, selling frozen seafood, we compete with the big food distributors like Sysco and U.S. Foods and people like that, and a lot of times it’s really hard to compete with them on those types of items. They can’t really handle the fresh fish and stuff like that the way we can, so we kind of leverage our supply and our sources of fresh fish and fresh seafood to help sell the frozen and create the business.” - Steven Rash

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