PrimeFish Founder Jake Dellagrotta and Whitecap International Seafood Exporters Co-Founder Darrell Roche wanted to make affluent seafood more accessible by delivering it right to customers’ doorsteps. Over the past 6 years, they've done just that.
Dellagrotta founded Rhode Island, U.S.A.-based PrimeFish in 2020, setting out to do things differently. As a fourth generation member of the seafood industry, he wanted to leverage his age and tech savvy to an "old school" industry.
"How the majority of the seafood industry works now is not consumer-facing," Dellagrotta said. "It's all behind the scenes and it works – that industry works. It's a huge industry and they don't need social media to make that work. It's very tight knit in a lot of places. It's a small industry by people, not by dollars, and they don't need social media."
Dellagrotta’s career began in marketing, which provided the foundation for social media promotional content and luxury seafood to merge. Consumers "buy with their eyes," Dellagrotta said, and creating a visually appealing product was something he knew could drive sales and create space for innovative product launches. He started by uploading ideas online to see what generated traction and soon saw the need to have his face behind the brand. That led him to create the "Luxpack line."
"The first video I made was just me talking about my product; it was a huge turning point," Dellagrotta said. "It basically gave me the ability to be able to just speak to a customer and get from point A to point B with the customer, telling them my message without having to show a bunch of visuals. There's a huge trust factor in this. We're sending frozen seafood in the mail – to someone's door – and it's not cheap. Seeing a face and knowing there's someone behind this, it just builds that trust."
Trust is just as important for Roche, who cofounded a global seafood export company nearly 20 years ago. Whitecap sells premium shellfish to 35 countries globally, and the partnership with PrimeFish was spurred by a desire to help the North American market eat crab in new ways in the form of a convenient product.
"We've got tens of millions of pounds of this premium shellfish in the Whitecap camp," Roche said. "We've got a global reach where we have factories and the capital to finance this type of expansion. Then we brought that, married that together with somebody that is young, innovative, got a fresh take on it, and has done an incredible job of selling the message. A lot of people love to eat crab in the shell and break it, and the crab oils and lobster oils, and that's great, but there was another market because of our global sales reach."
That led PrimeFish and Whitecap to create snow crab butter, launching at the end of July 2026. Roche added that value-added direct-to-consumer products like lobster rolls are readily available to many consumers, especially in New England. But, products such as snow crab and king scallops are more rare, despite being the same caliber. The secret has been simplicity, Dellagrotta said, merging versatility with ready-to-use products.
"It's snow crab meat and then butter and avocado oil," Dellagrotta said. "It's a spreadable, scoopable, easy to use, fully cooked [product]. It goes in your freezer. It works for home consumers and chefs alike. The uses are just endless. I can't even think of how many there are, but just a few is you put it on a steak as a topper, you spread it on toast, you can put it in eggs because the snow crab content is so high, you can really just warm it up and put it in a crab roll. It's just endless, the things you can do with it. We're very excited about it."
PrimeFish is also launching king crab splits, crab cakes, lobster cakes, and snow crab roll kits; all of which can be shipped through FedEx. Roche said Dellagrotta has "done an incredible job of maintaining the cold chain" by focusing on taking quality, one-day catch and delivering it quickly without disruption.
Whitecap Category Manager Liam Gale works with Dellagrotta and Roche on quality assurance, research and development, sales, marketing, and more, specifically on product design and sourcing with PrimeFish. Roche and Gale are both based in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, but often travel internationally to different plants – often on Air Canada's 12th row – to destinations such as eastern Canada, the U.S., Scotland, Vietnam, Chile, Indonesia, and Norway. For those trips, Roche said Dellagrotta is also included.
"One of my favorite things about it is when I get a call out of the blue from Jake; it could be in the middle of the night, could be first thing in the morning, like this morning, with an idea," Gale said. "He'll call me up and say, ‘hey, I dreamt about this last night,’ or ‘I was eating supper and I had this idea, do you think we can do it,’ and I say, 'yeah, absolutely we can do it.' Many of the products we've designed together have started from conversations like that, where it's been, 'do you think we can get away with doing something like this, do you think we can make this work,' and then we turn around and do it."
Once the idea is formed, Dellagrotta brings his film crew to destinations around the world, showing the product's origin from the scallop draggers, fishing vessels, and rural factories. Canada remains the biggest sourcing area for seafood, but Roche said king scallops are also sourced from Scotland, and shrimp products from Australia, Vietnam, and Indonesia are on the horizon.
"I think it's a testament to our bond, and it's a business partnership, but it's a friendship," Dellagrotta said. "You need that to do what we're doing, I don't think this works in any other circumstance. I don't want to call it luck; I like to call it stardust. A lot of things happen in life that you can't explain; you meet the right people at the right time, you're in the right place at the right time, things click, and you just say thank you and lean into it and keep going."
Now, Roche said the duo's approach helped generate millions in revenue with container lead times at six months, valued at USD 2 million (EUR 1.7 million). Roche said Whitecap is producing "dozens and dozens" of premium quality seafood that Dellagrotta can now utilize for direct-to-consumer products.
"When the first call happened, our first year was less than a million, and now it's gone dramatically bigger than that," Roche said. "It keeps growing every year. We're not afraid of the competition, because what Jake's model and the investment that he's done online is that he's got the followers, he's got the active customers who come from that affluent demographic to afford what we're doing. But it's also the service and the credibility. You can't replicate what we're doing."
Roche added that competitors are often asking to move in and replicate the success, but the company "wouldn't trade Jake for any amount of money" saying "they're part of us, and that's not a sales pitch."
"You had better know who's in the foxhole with you," Roche said. "What impressed me about Jake from day one when we had our first conversation when I was talking to him, I'm like, ‘this person is onto something, but he has no ego.’ We're all the lunch pail guys. We're not flashy; we work hard. Jake is extremely effective online because he's so believable. His online persona and his real persona are the same. It's honest and fun and authentic and transparent."
Dellagrotta, Gale, and Roche all added how much the "people have made the place," from the fishermen, to the harvesters, to the processors, to the logistics team, to the packagers, to the Whitecap leadership team.
"My favorite part of you know this job is you know Jake's from New England you know we're from eastern Canada, you know we represent processors and harvesters from Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, PEI, Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island," Roche said. "I'm very proud to highlight that culture, that origin, the pristine waters from where the seafood comes from. We together are making everyone feel part of it, whether you're taking the trap, whether you're the general manager or the owner of the processing plant, whether you're the plant worker that's putting that through the line."
