Nancy Raye, the third generation-owner of Raye’s Mustard who helped the company survive the death of Maine’s sardine industry and grow to an international business, has died.
Fourth-generation owners Kevin and Karen Raye, her cousin and his wife, announced her death on social media Friday. Their post did not give her age or birthday, but she was born in 1940.
Raye ran the business from 1990 to 2005, a period her family called pivotal as the sardine industry declined and “spelled doom” for Raye’s Mustard, which supplied mustard to be packed into cans with sardines at area canneries. Nancy Raye moved home to Eastport from California to save the business, pivoting to focus on specialty and gourmet mustards for retail.
“With her native positivity and ‘can-do’ spirit, she made it her mission to save Raye’s Mustard, and she succeeded,” the Rayes wrote.
Raye’s grandfather, J. Wesley Raye, started the business in 1900 after returning home from the Spanish-American War, according to Bangor Daily News archives.
He saw an opportunity to improve mustard-making and went on to supply the many sardine packing operations that then lined the coast in Maine and New Brunswick — virtually all of them, the BDN previously reported — and ran the company until his death in 1948.
He was succeeded by his son, H. Wadsworth Raye, and then H. Wadsworth Raye’s son, Donald, until Nancy Raye’s return home.
The mustard stood apart from conventional offerings because it was freshly ground, keeping full flavor in the finished product, Raye told the BDN. She described a “cold-ground” process that grinds mustard seeds, vinegar, water and spices are mixed by hand in wooden vats before being ground on massive granite wheels in a shaft-powered mill.
As the sardine industry declined, Raye’s reached a turning point, Nancy Raye previously said: expand into retail or shut down. As consumer tastes changed and fishery regulations tightened, the dozens of sardine canneries that had lined the coast in the 1950s began to close, the last one shuttering in 2010.
Raye’s, meanwhile, already sold mustard from the factory to locals, and within a year at the helm Nancy Raye had opened a shop while developing a gourmet reputation and new markets: a gift shop, a takeout stand, international buyers, and mail orders.
The market was limited only by imagination and capital, she told the BDN in 1993, and when people tasted it, it sold itself.
Today, the company offers an extensive line of specialty mustards, ground on the same stones, and also runs a museum in Eastport.
“Nancy has done a tremendous job elevating it from a small factory for sardines to a real namesake of fine mustards all over the world,” then-City Manager Bud Finch said when she sold the business — by then, the nation’s last traditional stone-ground mustard mill — to her cousins in 2005.
Nancy Raye was also focused on keeping it in the family.
“I like to take something old and make it work. I guess I don’t really fit into the disposable age,” she told the BDN in 1992. “There are values here that I want to maintain, and at the same time, I want to make our mustard competitive in today’s market.”
