A trio of Maine seafood industry veterans has bought a former sardine cannery in Gouldsboro and plans to revive it as a processor of Maine seafood.
Curt Brown and Betsy Lowe, both formerly of Ready Seafood, and Pete Daley, formerly of Garbo Lobster and Acadia Seafood, have partnered to create Bold Coast Seafood, Brown said Friday. And last week, the new company bought the former Stinson Seafood sardine cannery in the Gouldsboro village of Prospect Harbor.
“We are over the moon,” Brown said Friday. “We’re really excited about the future of this industry.”
For roughly the past five years, since former property owner East Coast Seafood quietly packed up and left town, there have been no seafood processing operations at the plant. A live lobster-buying and distribution business has operated at the plant’s pier, where sardine boats used to unload their catch, and earlier this year, Wyman’s leased part of the 100,000 square-foot building to create much-needed freezer space for its frozen blueberries and other fruit-based products.
Brown said that Bold Coast Seafood already has begun lobster-buying operations at the site, where a large storage tank was constructed after Bumble Bee Foods shut down the sardine canning operations. East Coast Seafood left no equipment behind, he said, so it will take some time to restore the building’s processing capacity, which could take months to get online.
Lobster will be the largest-volume product they handle, he said, and they also hope to buy and sell scallops, which is a wintertime fishery that keeps many fishermen busy after the summer to fall lobster season slows down.
But the species Brown said he is most excited about is Jonah crab. The market for it is relatively small compared to lobster, but the Gouldsboro plant has an advantage that other facilities lack, which is an ample supply of fresh water.
Jonah crab is more difficult to process than lobster — which is one reason why picked and packaged crabmeat typically costs more than lobster — and requires a high volume of freshwater, Brown said. The volume needed can be difficult to obtain and pay for through a treated water system operated by a town or private provider, he said, but the Gouldsboro property comes with 65 acres on the western side of Route 186 that sits atop an underground aquifer.
There are four wells on this property that can provide enough water, and at price affordable enough for the new company to include processed Jonah crab among its products, Brown said.
“The missing link is processing,” Brown said of the Jonah crab market. “That was the selling point for us in buying the property.”
The former Stinson Seafood sardine cannery has not enjoyed good fortune since it shut down in 2010, when it was the final remaining sardine cannery in the United States. It was revived as a lobster processing plant, first by Live Lobster and then by East Coast Seafood, but each time operations at the site came to a halt.
In the case of Live Lobster, the company was derailed less than two years after it arrived by unpaid debts and was forced to shut down by unhappy lenders. Next in 2012 came East Coast Seafood, which lasted for a few years but quietly left town in 2020 after deciding to consolidate its processing capacity with another plant it owned in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
After that, the next plan for reviving the plant was to process farmed salmon that was to be grown in pens in nearby Frenchman Bay. But American Aquafarms, the Norwegian-backed company that floated that plan, ran into stiff local opposition from area residents and legal issues in Europe, and was unable to line up investors or to obtain state approval.
A former American Aquafarms executive ended up owning the plant, which was used as collateral in a loan, and then auctioned it off two years ago. The two local businessmen who bought it at that auction, Kevin Barbee and Tim Ring, owned the property until last week, when Bold Coast Seafood bought it for an undisclosed price.