Take a five-minute walk down India Street in Portland, Maine, and you’ll pass local chain Coffee By Design, Micucci’s Italian grocery store and Benkay Japanese Restaurant & Sushi Bar. At the end, cross over Commercial Street to the waterfront, walk past the terminal for Casco Island Ferry Lines to reach Ready Seafood and about a quarter of a million lobsters on the Maine State Pier.
Since 2009 Ready, a wholesale lobster buyer and shipper, has been neighboring the fine-dining restaurants, pubs, boutiques and hotels that dominate Portland’s waterfront. The company announced this summer it will be more than doubling its space in the Portland Ocean Terminal to 24,000 square feet, which also doubles its lobster-holding capacity to about half a million.
As it grows, Ready will have company. In 2014, Shucks Maine Lobster from Richmond, Maine, will open a processing plant as part of a 15-year lease developing 19,000 square feet on the same pier. John Hathaway, Shucks president, says his company’s move to the city will help it capitalize on lobster’s potential as a value-added product.
The development bucks national trends. Seafood processing is mostly tucked away in remote places, offshore in factory ships or driven out of the country entirely by the lure of cheap foreign labor. At the same time, working waterfronts are being crowded out by high rents and other types of development. Here and elsewhere, waterfront is not only vital for marine industries but also a desirable place to live. According to the National Symposium on Working Waterfronts, the population in the nation’s coastal areas increased by almost 50 percent from 1970 to 2010.
Click here to read the full story that ran in the September issue of SeaFood Business >
