Ready Seafood, a subsidiary of Premium Brands Holdings Corporation, has filed a lawsuit in a U.S. district court alleging Packers Pride stole trade secrets, including customer information.
Packers Pride was founded by Andrew Daughan, who was named in the lawsuit along with Robert Kragh. According to the complaint filed by Ready Seafood in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, Ready alleges both Daughan and Kragh took proprietary customer information from the company to Packers Pride.
“For Daughan and Kragh’s own benefit and/or the benefit of Packers Pride, defendants Daughan and Kragh misappropriated confidential customer proprietary information acquired in the course of their fiduciary relationship with plaintiff to use to divert business opportunities from plaintiff,” Ready’s lawsuit states.
According to the lawsuit, both Daughan and Kragh were once employees of Ready Seafood. It claims Daughan, hired “on or around 24 April 2018,” served as the vice president of category management for the company, and when Ready was purchased by Premium Brands in April 2018, he agreed to a USD 92,646 (EUR 78,931) earnout in exchange for signing an agreement that included non-compete, non-solicitation, and confidentiality provisions.
Those provisions included a two-year non-compete that would require Daughan to not acquire or own in any manner any interest in any limited liability company, or be employed or served at any company, that competes or planned to compete in any way with Ready Seafood. It also required Daughan to not attempt to employ or enter any contractual agreement with any former employee of Ready Seafood until that employee had no longer been affiliated with it for at least six months.
The lawsuit alleges that despite that noncompete agreement, Daughan started Packers Pride within months of his 3 March, 2025 departure from Ready Seafood. The company also said he left Ready Seafood without any prior notice – taking with him “ten or more notepads and/or notebooks” containing handwritten notes on his tasks and his communications with Ready’s customers.
Daughan, in a filing responding to the lawsuit, claimed he never signed the noncompete agreements, and wasn’t even aware of their existence. It also claims those covenants are not enforceable, and that Duaghan did not misappropriate any information when he took the notepads.
Ready Seafoods’ complaint also said that on 6 June 2025, Kragh resigned from his position at Ready Seafood with no prior notice, and similarly stole trade secrets.
“In the days leading up to his surprise resignation, Kragh accessed a treasure trove of Ready Foods confidential customer proprietary information that he did not otherwise need to access during the final weeks of his employment,” the lawsuit states.
According to the lawsuit, Kragh allegedly accessed a range of information including PowerPoint presentations on sales pitches, excel spreadsheets with formulas Ready Seafood used to quote customer purchase orders, and excel spreadsheets comparing Ready Seafood’s purchase order history, product price point, amount of sales revenue generated, and the profit Ready received.
“Kragh had no reason to access this information in 2025, let alone three days before his June 6, 2025, resignation,” the lawsuit states.
Daughan and Kragh’s response claims that the information was needed for his work at the time.
“Kragh did not misappropriate any information from the files he reviewed during the last month of his employment, because he was using them to perform work for Ready Seafood, which Ready Seafood knew,” the response states.
Ready Seafood claims despite Daughan and Kragh’s objections that “on information and belief” that Daughan deliberately recruited Kragh to join him at the newly-formed Packers Pride company in violation of the original noncompete. It also alleges that the two deliberately staggered their resignations to give Daughan time to create Packers Pride and begin soliciting Ready Seafood’s clients while giving Kragh additional time to “misappropriate Ready Seafood confidential customer proprietary information.”
The lawsuit claims that the company became further aware of the issue when on 13 June, 2025, a Ready Seafood employee received an email purchase order in error from New England Cold Storage – a third-party cold storage facility – that was not intended for Ready Seafood. The lawsuit states the employee noticed the purchase order originated from Seafood 2000, and not Ready Seafood, and was with one of Ready Seafood’s large volume customers.
“Upon information and belief, Packers Pride, with Daughan and Kragh at its helm, is an exclusive broker of Seafood 2000’s lobster products, which are branded as Packers Pride products,” the lawsuit states.
As it filed its complaint, Ready also filed a motion for a temporary restraining order to prevent Daughan from continuing to operate Packers Pride, and to order him to immediately return all confidential information to Ready Seafood.
Packers Pride, in its response, said a restraining order is not needed and that Ready Seafood is unlikely to succeed with its lawsuit.
“No immediate threat of irreparable harm exists for three reasons. First, Ready Seafood has known since Daughan resigned in March 2025 that he has been operating a competing business and had taken some notepads from the office, but did nothing about it for months,” the response filing states. “Second, four other employees very similarly situated employees have left Ready Seafood and are competing, but Ready Seafood has failed or chosen to refrain from enforcing the Restrictive Covenants against them.”
The response also states Premium Brands has started purchasing competing products from Daughan in May 2025, and still has a purchase order with the company now.
“How can Ready Seafoods credibly claim to be irreparably harmed by competition from Daughan when its own parent company is directly facilitating that competition?” the response states.
