Retiring US retail seafood executive has seen it all

摘要

Dave Veach isn't just retiring he's exiting an industry he was quite literally born into. The longtime seafood specialist from HyVee-owned Perishable Distributors of Iowa (PDI) began working at his father's Des Moines, Iowa, seafood store — Veach's East Side Fish Market ~ at age 14 and went on to run the business until the doors closed in 1993. The following year, Veach got a job in seafood sales at PDI; the company sells seafood and other proteins to HyVee, a retailer that has 235 retail stores across eight Midwestern US states and rakes in about $7.6 billion (EUR 5.9 billion) in sales. He's been with the company ever since ~ and has seen plenty of changes come to the often-overlooked Midwest market. "Here in the Midwest, what I've seen is peopleare more willing to try different fish," he said. "People have moved around the country and people from the coasts have moved inland, so they've asked for the types of fish they were accustomed to eating when they were on the coast. That's created a [different] demand here in the Midwest."