Just how fragile is Alaska’s food supply chain?

It’s hard to remember now — a lot has happened since — but there was a time, back in February and March, when things got rather heated along the traditionally friendly, extremely long and largely unguarded Canada-U.S. border.

 In response to President Donald Trump’s tariff threats and talk of annexing Canada, provincial liquor authorities stripped American booze from store shelves. Canadian tourism to the United States plummeted. And British Columbia’s premier, David Eby, threatened to place tolls on commercial trucks traveling from the U.S. through B.C. to Alaska along the Alaska Highway. Doing so would further increase the state’s already high cost of living and possibly disrupt its food supply chain. 

 The Alaska Highway, or AlCan, was built in 1942 to keep the state supplied and defended in the event of a Japanese attack. Mile Zero is located in the very small city of Dawson Creek on the eastern edge of British Columbia, near the Alberta border. To reach it, Alaska-bound trucks can enter Canada at any of several border crossings in northern Washington, Idaho and Montana; I-5 hits the border at Blaine, Washington, while I-15 arrives at Sweetgrass, Montana. Various highways funnel traffic toward Dawson Creek, the options thinning as drivers head north, until there’s just the one road and the AlCan begins. From there, it climbs north and west to Beaver Creek, Yukon, Canada’s westernmost community, and then crosses the international border, plunging deep into Alaska’s sparsely populated interior before officially dead-ending in the town of Delta Junction — 1,387 miles from Dawson Creek — where it joins the older Richardson Highway to Fairbanks. 

I’ve lived alongside the Alaska Highway, where it passes through the Yukon capital of Whitehorse, for most of the past 16 years. The tolls have yet to be implemented — although Eby’s government has created the legislative framework to do so — but I was fascinated by the threat, and by the paradox of a road built for Alaska’s defense transformed into a glaring weakness by unpredictable foreign relations. I pictured Alaska as a balloon bobbing at the end of a very long string, with Canada, an unexpected adversary, wielding a pair of scissors.  

Getting fresh food to Alaska has been a challenge since the first settlers began scratching in the creek beds for gold. It was just too far from the continent’s more populated areas, separated from the contiguous United States by cold, stormy seas and, on the few precarious overland routes, avalanche-prone mountain passes. During the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1890s, authorities feared that the hordes of prospectors would starve, and stories from that time — almost legends at this point — depict entrepreneurial types struggling to bring unbroken eggs all the way to the Yukon gold fields or herd reluctant cattle over Alaska’s Coast Range. Thirteen decades later, the challenges remain. Alaska’s food prices are second only to Hawai’i’s. One recent federal study found that prices in Anchorage were 36% higher on average than those in the Lower 48. A 2023 report commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) described Alaska’s food supply chain as “unique and vulnerable to disruption.” 

I wasn’t the only one surprised by Eby’s apparent willingness to threaten that supply chain — to hit Alaskans in the gut. “It’s going to be a big deal,” Alaska state Sen. Robert Myers, R, who also works as a commercial trucker, told the Alaska Beacon. “Fresh produce — the vast majority of our fresh produce … gets trucked up. If you want to get something up here fast, you put it on a truck, not a barge.”

The truth is, Canada doesn’t have nearly as much power over Alaska’s food supply as Myers or I assumed. The supply chain was never just a long thin string. It’s actually more of a tangled ball of yarn, and the Alaska Highway, it turns out, is just one thread.

There’s no doubt that trucking is the fastest long-haul option. No railroad connects Alaska and the Lower 48, and air freight is financially viable for only a few high-end commodities — non-Alaskan seafood, say, and time-sensitive produce like cherries. It takes around 40 hours of nonstop driving to cover the more than 2,200 highway miles from Seattle to Fairbanks via the AlCan. Even factoring in some halfway-decent rest time for the driver, that’s still a lot quicker than the several-days-long container-ship-to-port-to-truck relay that moves goods to Fairbanks from the Port of Tacoma through Anchorage. But I wanted to confirm that assumption, and to know how much food actually came up the highway every year. I had visions of digging up delightful trivia: How many thousands of gallons of milk bounced over potholes to Alaska each year? How many loaves of bread?

 I reached out to the Yukon Department of Highways and Public Works, which oversees the highway weigh station in Whitehorse that I’ve cycled and driven past countless times. The department replied apologetically that it didn’t have the data I wanted; it tracks cargo by weight, dimension and destination, but not by content. U.S. Customs and Border Protection couldn’t help either, I was told, because freight traveling through Canada to Alaska was considered neither an export nor an import, but rather “domestic in-transit freight,” and its contents were not inventoried at the border. The Canada Border Services Agency directed me to Statistics Canada, which didn’t keep data on such in-transit goods either.

These agencies did, however, share a few data points. Customs and Border Protection told me that in fiscal year 2024, 8,298 commercial freight-hauling trucks entered Alaska from the Yukon. That’s fewer than 23 trucks per day — not nearly enough to account for the roughly $2 billion worth of food that enters the state annually to feed its nearly 750,000 residents. Meanwhile, Statistics Canada was able to give me details on the foods that Canada exports directly to Alaska, as opposed to those it simply allows to pass through. In 2024, that list included salmon (fresh, frozen and smoked), cattle and buffalo, honey and seed potatoes, dried peas and lentils, cranberries and cumin, and an assortment of grains — durum wheat, barley, oats and malt. (It also included “caviar substitutes, prepared from fish eggs other than sturgeon,” and even Communion wafers. You’re welcome, Alaska.)

 I also contacted several grocery chains with multiple stores in Alaska, to see if they could tell me how much food they were bringing up the highway. I emailed the Alaska Commercial Company, Fred Meyer (via parent company Kroger), Carrs-Safeway (via parent company Albertsons), and Three Bears, but no one responded with the data I was looking for. It wasn’t until I talked to a woman named Kelly, who works in deliveries but wasn’t authorized to speak to me by her employer, a major grocery chain, that I realized the highway was something of a red herring. “I can’t speak for every grocery store,” she said, but “our stuff comes up on the barge, the vast majority of it.” They used to do more trucking, she explained, but despite its slower pace, shipping had proven consistently more reliable. Highway delays caused meat and milk to spoil, in particular, so they basically phased that out.

 Rachel Lord, the advocacy and policy director for the Alaska Food Policy Council, confirmed Kelly’s comments. There are exceptions, she told me in a Zoom call from her office in Homer, but most of the state’s imported food now comes by container ship from Tacoma.

 I told Lord that I had been struggling to find solid data on food imports, and she laughed. “It’s not you, it’s all of us,” she said. The data as I envisioned it — so many thousands of gallons of milk, so many loaves of bread — doesn’t yet exist in any coherent way. “It’s not there.”

 It’s commonly said, for example, that 95% of Alaska’s food is imported. “There are no data citations you can pull for that,” Lord said. “It was mentioned by somebody at some point in some report, but there were no data citations associated with that, right? It’s a feeling, it’s probably fairly accurate, but it’s not — it’s just made up. But we can say the vast majority of the food that Alaskans buy at a store is imported from outside. That is solid.”

Hillary Palmer is an Alaska-based program manager at Dewberry, a national design, planning and construction firm. She was the Alaska lead on the 2023 report commissioned by FEMA, so she has about as firm a grasp as anyone of just how vulnerable Alaska’s food supply chain is, and where its weak points lie. 

According to Palmer’s report, roughly 4% of Alaska’s imported food comes via the AlCan. Walmart hauls a good chunk of that 4%, trucking its fresh meat and produce from Washington to seven of its nine Alaska locations. (Walmart’s Ketchikan and Kodiak stores are not on the road network.) “They haul with two drivers,” Palmer told me, “so that one can be sleeping while the other is driving.” Walmart has also developed specialized equipment to help protect the trucks’ chassis from frost heaves and other cold-weather damage to the road. Walmart’s team knows where the reliable refueling stops are located along the most remote stretches of the highway, and the drivers haul their own backup fuel, just in case.  

But the retail behemoth is an outlier. Most of the rest of the state’s imported food comes by sea — and that brings its own logistical challenges.

 In broad strokes, Alaska’s food supply chain currently looks like this. It’s important to remember that imports from the Lower 48, Canada, Mexico and elsewhere are only one piece of the picture — a big slice, but not the whole pie. “A huge amount of, especially rural Alaska, has subsistence wild foods that they rely on,” Rachel Lord says. That means salmon, of course, and caribou, and other fish and game, as well as foraged berries and plants and more. (Palmer’s report found that 65% of all the state’s residents, and 98% of the rural ones, engage in some form of subsistence food-gathering. Rural Alaskans, for whom rates of food insecurity can be twice as high as those living closer to cities and major roads, each harvest on average 300 pounds of wild food each year. Altogether, Alaskans consume somewhere between $450 million to $900 million worth of wild foods every year.) 

And there’s been a surge of new farms in the state as well: The number grew by 30% from 2012 to 2017 in Alaska, while the United States as a whole saw a 3% decline. “We can’t grow avocados, but we can grow a lot,” said Lord — everything from livestock feed to fruits and vegetables, the latter sometimes supported by greenhouses or hydroponic systems. Alaska-raised meats and aquaculture products, like oysters, also are available, and there’s even a handful of vineyards.

But the traditional subsistence foods that nourished Alaska Natives for thousands of years before the gold-seekers arrived are beset by climate change and other man-made stressors, such as industrial fishing and habitat destruction from mining. And while the state’s agricultural sector is growing, it’s a long way from being able to replace all food imports; 43% of the state’s farms are less than 10 acres in size. 

Which brings us back to the imports, what bush Alaskans sometimes call “store food.” Imports generally depart from the Port of Tacoma in Washington and spread out in three directions. Unalaska, in the Aleutian chain, receives direct shipments from Washington and then serves as a transport hub for southwest Alaska. Southeast Alaska, too, has a direct line to Tacoma, with shipments to Ketchikan, Juneau and beyond. But the vast majority of shipping crosses the Gulf of Alaska and heads for the Port of Alaska in Anchorage, where more than half the state’s population lives. Two large container shipping companies, TOTE and Matson, do the hauling, with deliveries arriving twice a week, and a complex network of barges, trucks and planes takes it from there, spooling out across the state’s vast interior.

 “We are a ship-to-shelf state,” Lord said. “So when food comes into the port and goes out, it is, I’ve heard, anywhere from three to seven days’ worth of food. That is an extreme vulnerability.” (Kelly, the longtime grocery worker, agrees. “I have seen people on Facebook say, ‘Oh, surely they have stuff in the back room,’” she told me. “Well, we have a couple days’ worth.”)

In the Lower 48, by contrast, food is collected in regional distribution centers — whether it came from U.S. fields, off trucks from Mexico or elsewhere in the Americas, or by ship from Europe or Asia — before being doled out to individual stores, according to Benjamin Lorr, the author of The Secret Life of Groceries. Alaska lacks that middle step; even Hawai’i, in comparison, keeps up to two weeks’ worth of food in its warehouses at any given time.

Keeping Alaska’s supply chain healthy is a shared effort — a civic project. And … it seems to me that the biggest threat it faces is not some Canadian political bluster, but a failure to understand, and support, the role of public works and collective interventions in keeping the state fed.

Once the food has made its way to Alaska, whether by sea or by land, it faces a whole new tangle of logistical challenges. While a solid majority of Alaskans live along the state’s sparse road network, mostly concentrated in greater Anchorage, its semi-rural suburbs in the Mat-Su Borough, and in greater Fairbanks, 82% of the state’s communities are not reachable by road. The systems that carry food across all that land and water are vulnerable in myriad ways. Many small, fly-in communities are eligible for a subsidized air freight program administered by the U.S. Postal Service. Bypass Mail, as it’s called, is a lifeline — but it’s also, as Mike Jones, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, explained, susceptible to delays and spoilage. As the food gets transferred from larger air carriers to much smaller ones, making its way from, say, Anchorage to Nome and then on to an array of often-icebound coastal villages, it sits in hangars and on airstrips. And sometimes it freezes. Or thaws. Or just goes off. 

I’ve visited a few of those communities, with their thinly stocked store shelves and stratospheric prices. I’ve even been an ad hoc fruit-and-veg mule myself, hauling strawberries and kale salads and other produce onto passenger flights for the people I was visiting. I thought I understood the difficulties. But the system was even more precarious than I’d imagined. 

The list of potential obstacles that Alaska’s incoming food must clear before it lands on anyone’s plate was dizzying. Palmer’s report grappled with everything from earthquakes, tsunamis and avalanches to cybersecurity, fuel availability and wildfires. 

It struck me that, for a state where many residents pride themselves on their self-sufficiency — and Alaskans in general are some of the most quietly competent and resourceful folks I’ve ever met — their food supply was unusually dependent on public infrastructure. Down South, private sector producers might rely mainly on a functioning road network to get their food to private retailers. But in Alaska, so much more was in play, across ocean, land and air. 

Keeping Alaska’s supply chain healthy is a shared effort — a civic project. And I might be biased, given my position on the other side of the border, but it seems to me that the biggest threat it faces is not some Canadian political bluster, but a failure to understand, and support, the role of public works and collective interventions in keeping the state fed. The Alaska Highway was, famously, completed in a matter of months. But the unglamorous task of maintaining port pilings and shipping berths, of filling potholes and keeping remote airport weather stations online, of caring for the herds of wild ungulates and schools of fish that feed people far from the nearest big-box grocery store — that work never ends.