Nor’Easter Oyster Company founders Jacqueline Clarke and Sean Corcoran began their value-added oyster company by trying to solve a problem they had noticed aquaculture producers in the U.S. state of Maine struggling with: what to do with oysters that were too large, clustered, or too misshapen for the raw bar market?
Or, in other words, what should the industry do with what Clarke and Corcoran call “raw bar rejects?”
Clarke told SeafoodSource at the 2025 Seafood Expo North America (SENA), which took place 16 to 18 March in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., that 48 percent of Maine’s oyster farms are younger than 5 years old. This presented Nor’Easter with an opportunity to fill an emerging gap in the market that was unavailable elsewhere in the U.S.
“What we’ve seen is that as [Maine’s] farmers are now looking to scale, there are some farmers who are concerned about local market saturation. Other farmers have oysters that have grown too big or are cosmetically unique and they can’t be sold to … raw bars,” Clarke said. “Sean and I looked at other places in the country that have different markets for unique oysters and looked at value-added shucking markets; they don’t exist in Maine. Their presence on the East Coast, specifically the New England region, is nowhere near where it is [elsewhere in the country].”
Clarke and Cocoran studied the Maine market and found that turning these oysters into value-added products not only provided Nor’Easter with a business opportunity, but also offered oyster farms a new value stream.
Because oysters destined for the value-added market do not have to look uniform, farmers can grow them at the bottom of their lines and they don’t have to turn them. In effect, Nor’Easter offers farmers a valuable opportunity to increase their production without increasing labor costs.
“[These oysters] are less labor-intensive and [have] less equipment costs and labor costs for farmers. So, it’s a great way to scale their business by creating a new market for value-added oysters,” Clarke said.
Nor’Easter’s oyster-processing program is both collaborative and traditional, according to Clarke. Strong relationships with local farms allow the company to plan its purchases carefully. The Nor’Easter team then shucks the oysters by hand, rinses them to remove debris, and sorts them by size.
The brand’s raw oysters are jarred the same day they are shucked and are used to create value-added products like smoked oysters or chowders processed in the company’s kitchen and smokehouse. To limit waste, Nor’Easter partners with local towns to donate its oyster shells to shoreline stabilization efforts.
The “supply chain timeline is very tight,” Clarke said, so relationships are key.
“We have pre-established relationships we have worked out with farmers, especially larger farmers,” she said. “I can’t have every farm bring in 10,000 oysters on a Monday. We schedule it out.”
Nevertheless, Nor’Easter is already looking to expand to address this challenge. Clarke said that the company was looking into a recirculating aquaculture system that would give them the capability to store live oysters.
“It’ll be a gamechanger,” Clarke said. “It’ll be great for farmers who want to offload larger quantities. It’ll be great in the winter, when 80 percent of the farms shut down. It’s a supply chain resiliency that we want.”
Nor’Easter is betting that its products will be popular with chefs, restaurants, and home cooks on the East Coast who want to cook with Maine oysters but want to reduce the time it takes to shuck. Clarke also said she believed Nor’Easter’s products would be especially competitive in a value-added market mostly saturated by Gulf oysters.
A chef in a small restaurant, for instance, could save on prep time and associated labor costs while still serving fresh Maine oyster chowder by using Nor’Easters pre-shucked products, Clarke said. Besides chowders and locally smoked oysters, Nor’Easter will soon offer tinned oysters, too.
So far, Portland, Maine’s SoPo Seafood and Brunswick, Maine’s Fisherman’s Net are stocking Nor’Easter products, and the team attended SENA, Clarke said, to meet with more buyers for both its retail products and its larger-scale formats for chefs.
Clarke told SeafoodSource that her ultimate goal with Nor’Easter Oyster Company is not only to capitalize on an underutilized market opportunity but to, as the company puts it on its website, “create a seafood industry that works for everyone – farmers, seafood lovers, and the environment.”
“Maine has a fantastic seafood reputation, and we are really … looking to promote that,” she said.
