With six locations across Arkansas, Eat My Catfish could be considered a homegrown success story, having started as a Benton food truck in 2008. Owner Travis Hester said the reason for the chain’s popularity is its focus on fresh, U.S. farm-raised catfish, something that meets consumer appetites for natural, high-quality food produced locally.
With Arkansas being the third-largest producer of catfish in the United States and, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the birthplace of catfish farming, one might imagine most of the fish he serves were raised in the state. Think again.
“We actually don’t buy any Arkansas catfish, and here’s why: Farmers depend on processors, so if you’re a farmer, you have ponds, you grow catfish, you’ve got to get that catfish out and take it somewhere to actually be processed,” he said. “There’s not a facility in the state of Arkansas that does that.”
Jeremy Robbins, president of The Catfish Institute, said the last Arkansas processor he knew of closed in 2015. Although he described the industry as stable today, he said there was a steady period of decline following 2001 that caused consolidation in both production and processing.
“Arkansas in 2001 had 31,000 acres of water raising U.S. catfish,” he said. “Today, they only have 3,200 acres of water, so only 10 percent of what they were. As there were fewer farms in Arkansas and more farms in Mississippi and Alabama, you saw a shift in that as the industry consolidated eastward a little bit, so did the processing.”
Since Arkansas catfish farmers ship their product to processors in states such as Mississippi, the nation’s largest catfish producer, it is likely some catfish purchased from those processors were raised in Arkansas. However, there was no way for restaurant owners to guarantee they were serving Arkansas catfish until very recently…