- May 8, 2025
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Emilio and Katie Sosa suddenly had a lot more mouths to feed.
The husband and wife duo met while working for the Florida Marine Research Institute in 1998 and decided to start Sammy’s Seafood — named after their pup, Sammy — in 2002. They started the company in their garage, when Katie was laid off from her position at the institute and pregnant with the couple’s first child. Within a year the couple was expecting again — this time with triplets.
Yet even amid the chaos of babies and business, the couple has built something of a fish distribution empire. Nearly 25 years after the start in the garage, Sammy's Seafood, based in St. Pete, has six trucks, 40 employees and $25 million in annual revenue by way of untold millions of mackerel, grouper, tuna, red snapper, and so on.
The pair say 90% of the customer base is made up of restaurants, usually local, because big chains are looking for broadline distribution. The two are happy, they say, to be a local business supporting other local businesses.
In addition, the couple's ability to sustain Sammy's amid a sea of challenges offers lessons to other business owners in resilience, readiness and, notably, really liking your business partner.
As a business that relies on the blue economy in addition to the mainland, staying afloat means fighting on two fronts.
When it comes to the water, unpredictable environmental disasters like the BP oil spill, hurricanes and red tide can take out shellfish farmers and decimate the supply chain.
The majority of Sammy’s Seafood customers are restaurants, which is a volatile market with openings and closings and constantly evolving consumer tastes. Big chain restaurants seek distributors that tend to specialize in frozen fish. Not only does Sammy’s prioritize fresh catch over frozen, the co-founders have even gone so far as to create a program that can tell consumers exactly where their fish came from.
“We love educating people on our end users. So when we started in this field, seafood was a little more opaque,” Katie says, “So when we came in, we did a lot of educating, total transparency, which is where our (sustainability) program came from.”
With a simple scan of a QR code, a customer can see the name of the vessel their catch arrived on; from where; the depth; and what kind of gear was used. This information especially comes in handy for high end restaurants that want to color in the experience for patrons.
“All of our higher ends pay for the story,” Katie says. “A lot of people, when they're buying that fish, want to know why it's different, right? You know, ‘I'm walking into a space that's beautiful, and you're going to serve me beautiful food, but if you can serve a story on top of that, and I can know that I'm buying this and supporting somebody local, that's really cool.’”
It doesn’t stop with forging connections between people and their food. While many of its competitors are streamlining processes through AI and other forms of automation, the Sammy’s crew leans into the old school way of acquiring customers and staff: human connection.
“There's a certain part that we're old school on, like, there's a lot of stuff back there that we still have to write down on paper and make sure it comes over here," Katie says, meaning the back of the warehouse to the front office. "And I'm investing in a sales team that calls people and shows up at their door and there's a connection there that grew us. I still value that piece of it because I feel like food's pretty intimate."
That doesn’t mean the couple isn't evolving or adapting. On the back end, “A lot of technology is really going to help,” Emilio says. Laser cutting, filleting and a portioning machine — even a machine designed to break down Styrofoam packaging, which can’t be recycled, is in the pipeline.
Most of the fish is sourced from North America. With the current conversation around tariffs, the company is also bracing for impact on its imports from Canada and Mexico. Emilio notes, “We [sell] a lot of shellfish. Salmon comes up from Canada, Halibut, yeah. A lot of fish comes from Mexico, and it's just going to increase the price.”
The pair are looking for more options domestically, but that doesn’t always translate. Prince Edward Island, or PEI, oysters taste the way they do because of the water they’re raised in. Although places like Rhode Island, Virginia and Massachusetts also have great oysters, the flavor will be unique to those places and are not necessarily a substitute.
Overall, the Sosas have weathered quite a bit of literal storms and economic ones in two decades in the seafood business. “The secret is just getting up and doing the same thing every day. We're grinders, so we just get up and keep doing the same thing every day,” Katie says.
With eyes on the future, the pair discuss growth of the business. “My favorite part,” Katie says, pausing with emotion in her voice and looking at her husband, “is working with each other,” Emilio finishes. Katie adds, “It’s a bit of a love story. I come in every day because you're gonna be here.”
