We sat down with Nan Devlin, Executive Director of Visit Tillamook Coast to talk about the creative work she’s been doing with partners to spotlight the bounty of her region—and to keep our coastal food local by providing marketing support for restaurants and close-to-home manufacturing infrastructure for the fishers, farmers and growers of the North Coast.

**Can you tell me about the food systems work you’re doing in Tillamook?
**It all started years ago when I did a listening tour of all the county’s communities and businesses—and it became clear that our restaurants, farmers, fishers and growers needed support. So, I applied for a Travel Oregon Rural Tourism Studio workshop with a culinary focus—a two-day conversation with community members designed to help rural communities develop and offer high-value, authentic experiences to travelers—in a sustainable, manageable way.

We had 70 people attend each day: farmers, fishers, restaurant owners, chefs, store owners and others. A couple of common themes arose. The first was that there was no infrastructure for them to use. Here we are, home to Tillamook Creamery and Pacific Seafood, but our small fishers and farmers had to travel miles to get access to a commercial kitchen. The small fishers had to sell their fish to Pacific Seafood because they were the only buyers able to take and process it. Last year at the Port of Garibaldi, the tuna fishers lost $1 million in revenue for not being able to offload their catch quickly and head back out. They need cold storage and packers and canners.

And the most common issue I heard from restaurant owners was that they didn’t have any budget for marketing. They all needed help with marketing. So, the problems we had to solve were clear: we had to build our businesses better. We needed infrastructure. And we needed marketing support.

**What happened after the Rural Tourism Workshop?
**The next year, we launched the North Coast Food Trail—an idea that developed in the workshop—in partnership with the Cannon Beach Chamber, Astoria Chamber and the City of Seaside. We have 84 members now from Clatskanie to Astoria to Neskowin. And I’m proud to say that not a single member of North Coast Food Trail went out of business during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Being part of an Oregon Food Trail means that you’ve got collaborative marketing support on a regional and national scale. We’ve had a lot of articles written in national magazines—Sunset Magazine named us the best food trip in the West. These businesses are mom-and-pop shops and don’t have the budget for this type of marketing and communications work. We produce videos and stories for them, always in their voice, and we promote them. We just finished four videos–partially funded by a Travel Oregon grant—for a YouTube video series called ‘Cooking with the Chefs of the North Coast Food Trail.’

If we hadn’t banded together and formed the Food Trail and had the support of Travel Oregon, TLT funding and grants, we’d be looking at a far different culinary landscape on the coast, that’s for sure. But we did—and the North Coast Food Trail and its participating businesses will celebrate our eighth year in 2025.

**What about infrastructure? Have you been able to address that need?
**We are working on it. Building the infrastructure our food system requires is more complicated, but we’re finding creative ways to get it done. As part of the rural tourism workshop, we did a series of focus groups, surveys and interviews, and I quickly realized that it’s one thing to talk about it but quite another thing to get into the details and figure out what’s needed and what will help make our fishers and farmers more efficient. Through that process, I discovered that several local producers were driving to the same restaurants on the same days and realized that a cooperative service could help. So, we worked with a group called Food Roots to launch a food hub in Tillamook—and now producers don’t have to spend time and emissions driving to the same restaurants and stores.

But we needed more than a food delivery hub, so I secured three Business Oregon Rural Opportunity Investment grants to do a strategic plan, feasibility, cost of equipment and architecture designs for an agricultural hub that would include cold storage, a commissary kitchen and a training center for processing in the Port of Tillamook Bay. And we’ve come up with a cooperative solution with the Port to build it. As a tourism organization, we can’t purchase property or buildings or secure large grants for this type of work. The Port, which is a designated evacuation center, can qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Homeland Security grants, but they don’t have anyone to manage a facility like this or to handle marketing or training. We realized we could help each other and enter into a cooperative effort where they would acquire the land and we would run the programs, training and marketing. Together with partners in the culinary space, we’ve organized into a 501c(3) under the name “Partners for Rural Food Systems.” It will be a win-win for our farmers and fishers, residents and visitors. And it’s all been made possible by the tourism industry.

**Why are food systems considered a tourism issue?
**Culinary tourism is a huge driver of our economy, especially on the coast. Nearly 75 percent of visitors enjoy food and drink when they visit—and they want to buy fresh, local seafood. They want to take it with them and cook it or go to a restaurant and enjoy fresh Dungeness crab or salmon. But believe it or not, Tillamook was so underdeveloped for tourism that you could not get fresh seafood here. And that’s the case for much of the coast as well; 90% of the seafood served on the Oregon coast is imported.

We would like to change things so that our seafood and produce don’t have to be sent away to be processed. We want to help our fishers have the means to thrive. Visit Tillamook Coast has been a destination management organization (DMO) since 2014, and the vast majority of the transient lodging tax (TLT) we collect here goes right back into the community for improvements and capacity building, directly benefiting local residents and businesses. There was this thought, once, that Tillamook was only for dairy farming and that there weren’t any tourists who wanted to come here. But that’s not the case. Tourists are coming—and they’re hungry for the food we harvest here.

**Other Resources to Explore:**

- Hungry for more? Learn more about Oregon’s 10 Food Trails: https://traveloregon.com/things-to-do/eat-drink/oregon-food-trails/
- Interested in other efforts to keep Oregon seafood local? Visit the Ocean Cluster Initiative, an effort by Oregon Coast Visitors Association: https://www.oregonseafare.com/