Franklin, Maine, U.S.A.-based Acadia Harvest, which had once operated a land-based fish farm growing California yellowtail, closed quietly within the past year.
Company executives Chris Heinig and Ed Robinson did not respond to SeafoodSource’s requests for comment, but the closure was confirmed by Coastal Enterprise Inc. (CEI) Fisheries Projects Director Hugh Cowperthwaite, and by Taylor “Tap” Pryor, the company’s former chief scientist.
Established in 2011, the company had been producing Maine Hiramasa-branded California yellowtail (Seriola lalandi) in a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) facility housed at the University of Maine Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research. In 2015, it won a USD 657,000 (EUR 604,000) National Science Foundation grant to support its research, development, and commercialization efforts. And in 2016, it raised USD 700,000 (EUR 623,000) from the Maine Technology Institute, CEI, and other investors to build out a land-based fish farm in Corea, Maine that was intended to have a one-million-pound capacity.
“It was a great effort, but ultimately, they were unable to push it over the goal line into expansion,” Pryor told SeafoodSource. “It was a giant leap forward to go from proof of concept at UMaine to a fully independent project. It just wasn’t in the cards.”
Pryor said the company “quietly folded” around six months ago.
In a profile on the company published in 2015 in the Portland Press Herald, Dave Rudie, CEO of Catalina Offshore Products in San Diego, California, warned that the yellowtail market was extremely competitive. While he said Acadia Harvest had the advantage of “being a local producer that can supply East Coast restaurants with ‘super fresh’ yellowtail,” the company’s biggest challenge “is selling its fish for a high enough price to pay for the higher production costs of a land-based fish farm.”
“The real test is when you are selling it and you are competing against all the kinds of yellowtail out there,” Rudie said at the time.
