Roger Berkowitz, former president and CEO of restaurant chain Legal Sea Foods, has big plans for his new e-commerce venture, Roger’s Fish Co.
Based in Salem, New Hampshire, U.S.A., Roger’s Fish formally opened its doors to the public this week, shipping premium seafood to customers across the U.S. The new concept, the company said in a press release, will make premium seafood available to everyone to cook at home, and provide prepared seafood meals that "turn home kitchens into five-star restaurants."
“We have been doing mail order/e-commerce since the 1970s,” Berkowitz told SeafoodSource, referring to his former company that he sold to Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based PPX Hospitality in late 2020. “It was always a side business and I lamented we should be spending more time on this. Given the pandemic and how … people’s habits have shifted to eating at home, I guess this is the appropriate timing.”
In fact, seafood consumption at home soared from 30 percent pre-pandemic to 77 percent in 2022, according to the FMI: The Power of Seafood report.
Taking advantage of Berkowitz’s decades of experience in the seafood industry, as a restaurateur and a James Beard Award-winner, he developed restaurant-quality products such as Double Clam Chowder and seafood pizzas like White Clam & Bacon and Truffled Lobster. Other products, shipped from the e-commerce company’s 20,000-square-foot facility in Salem, include: crab cakes, Loaded Lobster Mac & Cheese, and seafood gift boxes. The company is also offering a wide range of raw fish and shellfish, including live lobsters and frozen cod and salmon, as well as seafood-based pet treats, and other items.
Berkowitz originally retained the licensing rights to the Legal Sea Food brand in all non-food service areas such as retail and e-commerce, but he quickly realized that he and PPX Hospitality executives had differing visions.
“With one hand tied behind your back … and having to get approval for every recipe, I realized that, philosophically, we are on different pages," he said. "We terminated the rights to the Legal Sea Foods brand, so they have the rights to it and should do what they want with it.”
Berkowitz set out to develop new recipes from scratch, and the resulting products featured on Roger’s Fish Co. site are not Legal Sea Food-branded.
The next step was setting up a new facility to manufacture and distribute the products and hire employees.
“We did our own processing, and we were in the fish business. One of the first things PPX did was to eliminate that part of the business; they thought it was too costly. So, I regrouped with my former team,” Berkowitz said.
Most of the time, Legal bought fish directly off the boat – “that is what made us different over the years,” Berkowitz said, and the new e-commerce company is continuing that practice.
To sell the freshest frozen fish, Roger’s Fish Co. uses a proprietary "Nitro-Fresh" process that Berkowitz’s developed. The three-step process “utilizes nitrogen as a component to lock in quality at the peak of freshness,” the company said.
“This is a way of addressing supply issues and without needing to be out of product. It’s all natural, and it’s meant to have the highest-quality seafood at your fingertips,” Berkowitz said.
While declining to reveal the amount the company invested in its New Hampshire facility, Berkowitz said “the bones were there” and the company simply made modifications for small batch artisanal production.
Roger’s Fish Co. has the capability to “ramp up as much as we need to,” and Berkowitz said that’s exactly what he intends to do. The company is in talks with healthcare and other hospitality foodservice buyers about developing custom products and seafood meals for their operations.
Berkowitz is focused on helping healthcare facilities develop seafood recipes and products that are geared towards people with specific dietary needs, such as low sodium or low glycemic index.
“I’ve always been interested in public health, and worked for 20 years to take trans-fats out of U.S. diets,” he said.
Roger’s Fish Co. will also be developing some products in concert with well-known chefs. And, after building a foodservice b-to-b business, the company plans to eventually expand into retail sales.
