Vanlandschoot & Sons partner to bring Lake Superior whitefish to a national audience

Tinned fish is experiencing a renaissance.

Over the past decade, the launch of popular new brands like Fishwife and Fangst, along with a sea of TikToks reviewing oil-packed conservas from Portugal and Spain, has helped push canned fish beyond the pantry and into the mainstream of American cuisine.

Shoppers across the country will now spot a local staple tucked between the canned sardines, oysters and herring on store shelves: smoked Lake Superior whitefish processed in Munising.

Van Landschoot & Sons Fish Market of Munising have announced a partnership with the Grand Rapids-based company Great Lakes Tinned Fish that would contribute to the growing tinned fish market and introduce locally caught whitefish to a national audience.

The partnership will make Van Landschoot & Sons the primary supplier for the company’s full line of whitefish products.

“Great Lakes Tinned Fish is the first Midwest-based tinned fish company, and we source exclusively from the Great Lakes region,” founder Marissa Fellows said. “We’re in over 100 stores in 21 states already since launching in November, so we have not been idle in the last nine months, which is really, really exciting. We’re very proud to be bringing this to the Great Lakes. We’re putting the Great Lakes on the map for tinned fish.”

GLTF currently offers two varieties of canned whitefish, plain smoked and garlic shallot, with a lemon dill variety expected closer to the holidays. All of their fish is cold-smoked before canning, giving it a delicate, “buttery” texture that lends itself to classic whitefish dip, crostini or being eaten straight out of the can.

Fellows initially sourced her fish from other suppliers, but the partnership between Van Landschoot & Sons and GLTF started to take shape soon after the first cans went to market.

Dennis Van Landschoot, the company’s CEO, reached out through a mutual friend after reading about the project in the news, and the two quickly connected over a shared vision and appreciation for the region’s fishery.

“We have the best fish coming out of the greatest lake in the world,” Van Landschoot said. “We really liked the idea of a Michigan company, and the idea of a new channel for our fish rather than the normal fillets and smoked and everything. We catch a fish that is, I think, perfect for this type of processing. So it’s been a win-win.”

Van Landschoot knows whitefish. His company is the oldest and best-established commercial fishery still operating on Lake Superior, tracing its history back five generations to 1914.

As a boy growing up by the family dock in Browns Addition, he got conscripted into the business early, working on the boats until he moved away at 18.

Since returning to lead the business in 2017, Van Landschoot has kept the business moving forward by installing new processing machinery, launching food trucks in Munising and Marquette and now partnering with GLTF to bring Lake Superior whitefish to an entirely new market.

All of Van Landschoot & Sons’ whitefish are taken in trap nets — nonlethal devices that reduce wasteful bycatch — off the coast of the central and western U.P.

“We get them between Munising and Marquette off the islands out here,” Van Landschoot said. “And then we fish on the west shore of Houghton, down toward Ontonagon along the Keweenaw. Then we go all the way up to a place called Bete Grise, which is, I think, 8 miles from Copper Harbor.”

According to Fellows, going out on the boat together allowed her to see Van Landschoot’s practices firsthand.

“It is incredibly important for me to be a good steward of the Great Lakes,” Fellows said. “There is a lot of malpractice in the fishing industry at large. And I’m just really proud of these fifth-generation family fisheries doing hard work, doing it well, doing it with our natural resources in mind and doing it judiciously.”

Both Van Landschoot and Fellows subscribe to the 100% Great Lakes Fish Pledge, an initiative championed by the Conference of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers that seeks to reduce waste and dramatically increase the value of individual fish by finding uses for the skin, fat, scales and other byproducts that are commonly thrown away after processing.

And while those uses are still in development, the ethical philosophy of the initiative still informs the way both companies approach the fishery.

“To me, my involvement is really about finding suppliers that share that value system,” Fellows said. “So, making sure that anyone I’m doing business with is part of the pledge. And I also think being a connector is really important, so using my kind of startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem to try to identify some players who are actually doing tech innovations or other types of things that could use the byproduct.”

The partnership between Van Landschoot and GLTF represents an investment in sustainability, quality and a family business that has been a fixture of the community for more than a century. It also provides a novel way for people across the country to taste Michigan’s signature fish for the first time.

According to Van Landschoot, none of their past or present success would have been possible without the community’s support.

“Alger County is something special, with all of its wildlife and its fish and rocks and waterfalls,” he said. “But it all comes down to people. The people have just been so supportive for so many years to our company. Without that, we wouldn’t be here. … We just feel so blessed and we’re so, so thankful to God for what we’ve been able to hang on to for all these years.”

Great Lakes Tinned Fish can be found locally at Van Landschoot & Sons Fish Market in Munising and Everyday Wines in Marquette. Their products can also be found online, along with a list of recipes, at greatlakestinnedfish.com.