Instead of lamenting their jobs selling timeshares lost when the pandemic shut down tourism, Edward Blum and Jared Dufault decided to open their own business.
Kona Seafood Market opened Sept. 14 on Kopiko Street in the same parking lot as The Club and boasts the freshest local fish and seafood.
Blum said before the pandemic hit he was living in South Kona, and on his commute to town, would see three to four vendors on the side of the road selling fish, often with a line of people waiting to purchase the catch.
“It got to the point where we thought there has to be a better way. This can’t be the best solution for the locals who go out there and fish days on end trying to make ends meet,” recalled Blum. “For the locals who should have so much access to fresh fish, their options are the grocery store or someone on the side of the road just didn’t seem right to us. There’s got to be something better.”
They had friends who owned fishing boats tell them it would take two days to go out fishing and two days to sell all their fish.
They thought that the time spent selling fish could be better used to increase their catch.
“So we started selling their fish and we saw how big the demand was and it exploded from there. We knew that we had something,” he said.
The fishmongers locally source their seafood from fishermen. They also sell shrimp from Shrimp Improvement Systems, lobsters, oysters, clams and mussels from Kona Cold located at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority.
Both filed for unemployment when they lost their jobs. Dufault only received one check and Blum still has his claims pending since February 2020.
“If I was still waiting for that (unemployment insurance) I would be homeless, living in my car,” said Blum. “You can’t do that. You have to take advantage of the opportunities at hand. A lot of people sit there and feel sorry for themselves. I’m not that person. At the end of the day no one is going to take care of us.”
“Everything is a matter of perspective,” continued Dufault. “We can choose to look at it as the ‘feel bad for me’ or ‘I’m not going to start a business now’ but for us it was the perfect storm. It created the opportunity. If the coronavirus didn’t happen, we wouldn’t have this right now.”
“We have been very blessed,” said Blum. “We did this for our community. We did this to help the community.”
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