When Lagniappe Foods Founder Tom Dowd moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A., at 19 years old, establishing a successful seafood company wasn’t his top priority.
Dowd originally moved to New Orleans to pursue a career in music and ended up working in an oyster bar. After six years in the city, he moved back to the Northeast U.S. and kept working in the food industry.
“Eventually, I moved to Connecticut to work with a cousin who owned some bars and restaurants in the Stamford area. I wanted to start my own place, my own restaurant, but it was cost prohibitive,” Dowd said.
Instead of starting his own restaurant, Dowd set about starting Lagniappe Foods – taken from the word “lagniappe,” which means "unexpected gift" in Louisiana Creole. In its early days, he contacted people he knew in the New Orleans seafood industry and would fly up fresh specialty seafood like head-on shrimp, live crawfish, crab meat, and more.
“So, I put together this menu of Louisiana goods, and I don’t know how many items there were – it wasn’t a lot. We started in 1985 – I was 29 – and I was living in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a small apartment, and I just started talking to restaurants in Manhattan,” Dowd said.
To begin with, Dowd said he targeted mainly Creole or Cajun restaurants, which were popular in the area at the time – but soon found a wider market for his products.
“I ended up selling a lot to these high-end places because of the fresh head-on shrimp and some of those other items,” Dowd said.
In the early days, Dowd’s routine was simple: Make phone calls on Monday for orders, fly up the seafood he needed on Tuesday, drive his van down to LaGuardia or Newark airports, and make deliveries to the restaurants across Manhattan, with the goal of having an empty van by the time he returned home to Connecticut.
“I basically started the business with a van and USD 500 [EUR 478],” Dowd said.
Eventually, as business picked up, Dowd was able to get the company’s first big upgrade – a box truck with a refrigerator that could be plugged in at night so that he could store some of the seafood longer.
In 1988, Dowd moved back to New Jersey, and rented a small space that he said “was kind of like a garage” where he continued using his box truck as both a delivery vehicle and as storage.
Soon after that, Dowd said a buyer at a local market asked if Lagniappe Foods could make and supply crab cakes – and that was the catalyst for the company to begin making and selling its own products.
“Eventually it evolved, and now 100 percent of what we sell is what we make,” Dowd said.
Eventually, Lagniappe evolved beyond that early facility and moved into its current 25,000-square-foot space in Orange, New Jersey, in 2004 – which Dowd said was “a lot to handle” at first. Over the last few decades, the company has continued to evolve and build up its product lines, and it now supplies its products to chains like ShopRite and Whole Foods. In 2024, the company also came out with its own brand of retail products called Sea for Yourself.
“We’re in the freezer case for the first time with our name on it,” Dowd said. “Everything we’ve done has been in bulk, kind of foodservice packaging – but it's gone out to supermarkets that put it out as store meat.”
The company is capable of packaging products for both foodservice and for retail markets and can customize products and formulate recipes to a required price point or ingredient specification for customers.
Looking back on 40 years in business, Dowd said he never expected his company to reach the point it is at now.
“I hate to say it, but there was no master plan,” Dowd said. “I just rolled into it and went with the flow – one foot in front of the other. It’s not like there’s no plan at all, it all kind of evolves.”
Looking forward, Dowd said the company is working on a few new products that it hopes to bring to market. One of those is a seafood sausage that it has already established but with a new upgrade that allows the company to make it without any meat by using a casing that is made out of seaweed.
“We’re looking to do that this spring or summer, to see if that would interest people,” Dowd said.
Dowd said the company also does co-packing for a lot of different brands and has more room to grow beyond its existing size.
“We have room for growth, and we want to grow,” Dowd said. “Sometimes, it’s a matter of picking and choosing what you want to do and who you want to do it for – finding the right partners and finding the right product.”
