One of the boldest bets Chuck Bundrant made in his business career was that Americans would be just as happy with Alaska pollock in their fish sandwiches as they were with cod.

It helped make him a billionaire.

“If you don’t get a college education, you’re going to end up digging a ditch,” Mr. Bundrant recalled being warned by his father,...

One of the boldest bets Chuck Bundrant made in his business career was that Americans would be just as happy with Alaska pollock in their fish sandwiches as they were with cod.

It helped make him a billionaire.

“If you don’t get a college education, you’re going to end up digging a ditch,” Mr. Bundrant recalled being warned by his father, a salesman for General Foods. After one semester at what is now Middle Tennessee State University, however, the young man was impatient to start earning a living. In early 1961, he drove a 1953 Ford station wagon to Seattle and began looking for work in the fishing industry.

Mr. Bundrant started at the bottom, extracting crab meat from shells, and worked his way to the top by founding Seattle-based Trident Seafoods Corp., one of the world’s largest fish processors.

As the supply of cod shrank in the 1980s, Mr. Bundrant promoted pollock as a cheaper alternative. Its flavor was mild. It could easily be processed into breaded slabs or turned into fish paste or imitation crab meat. Restaurants could pitch it as a sustainable source of protein subject to strict regulation of fishing volumes.

As a result, the once-derided pollock has become one of the top-selling fish in America. U.S. production of Alaska pollock fillets is running at more than 40 times the mid-1980s level.

“Chuck was the first evangelist for Alaska pollock,” said Craig Morris, chief executive of the Association of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers.

Mr. Bundrant died Oct. 17 at his home in Edmonds, Wash. He was 79 and had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease more than a decade ago. Forbes estimated his fortune at $1.3 billion.

Mr. Bundrant promoted pollock as a cheaper alternative to cod.

Photo: Yuri Smityuk/Zuma Press

His son, Joe Bundrant,

who has served as chief executive of Trident since 2013, said the company had thrived on his father’s willingness to take big risks.

In the early 1970s, the founder commissioned a novel crab-fishing boat with onboard cookers and freezing equipment, reducing reliance on shore-based processing plants. A decade later, he built a mammoth processing plant on Akutan, a remote and barely inhabited Aleutian island. Land was so scarce there that Trident had to “blow out the side of a mountain” and bring in bulldozers to flatten the plant site, as a company history put it.

The Akutan plant gave Trident capacity to grab a major part of the market for Alaska pollock.

An astute builder of political connections, Mr. Bundrant helped shape and benefited from regulations that gave U.S.-owned companies the upper hand in fishing waters off Alaska.

Charles Hardin Bundrant, known as Chuck, was born Jan. 31, 1942, and grew up in Tennessee and Indiana. During high school in Evansville, Ind., he worked 40 hours a week at a grocery store and formed his own short-lived company to make plastic sheets designed to protect car windshields from ice and snow.

His initial career plan was to become a veterinarian, but the 1960 movie “North to Alaska” helped inspire a fascination with that state, according to “Catching a Deckload of Dreams,” a Trident company history by John van Amerongen.

In Seattle, Mr. Bundrant worked at a grocery store and searched for fishing jobs that would take him to Alaska. “I didn’t know anybody, and if you weren’t Scandinavian or Croatian, you didn’t have much luck,” he recalled later. A chance meeting in a barber shop led to a job in Alaska, where he packed crab meat into trays for freezing.

‘Chuck was the first evangelist for Alaska pollock,’ said one industry executive.

Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

He worked as a crew member on boats, learned to fish for crab and bought his own fishing vessels. After he married Mary Burch in 1965, they started a family. Long spells at sea put a strain on the marriage. “It’s either me or the boat,” he recalled his wife saying at one point. He considered returning to Tennessee and buying a farm but quickly concluded that fishing was far more profitable.

In the 1970s, he began building up Trident with partners Mike Jacobson

and Kaare Ness. Trident diversified from king crab to salmon, herring and pollock. Mr. Bundrant found customers as far away as Europe and Japan.

Seeking to establish pollock as a substitute for cod, he invited executives of the Long John Silver’s seafood-restaurant chain to Alaska. During a meal prepared by a Trident chef, one of the executives praised what he thought was cod and was shocked to learn it was pollock. The chain soon became a major customer.

Trident merged its seafood business into a company jointly owned with what was then known as ConAgra Inc. in 1987. That provided more capital for expansion. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Bundrant and partners bought ConAgra’s share of the business. They later bought seafood businesses from Tyson Foods Inc.

Mr. Bundrant is survived by his wife, Diane Bundrant, a sister, three children, 13 grandchildren and five great grandchildren. His earlier marriage ended in divorce.

He had little time for typical executive pastimes and once described golf courses as a “waste of good cow pasture.”

Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com