Stonington, Maine, U.S.A.-based Greenhead Lobster is branching into ready-to-eat specialty products, which it will produce at a new 15,000-square-foot processing facility the company is building in Bucksport, Maine.
With the U.S. lobster industry reeling from tariffs imposed on its products as a result of the trade war between the U.S. and China, Greenhead sees raw frozen and other value-added products as its best path to growth, according to company owner and president Hugh Reynolds.
Maine’s once-thriving business of shipping its live lobsters to China is temporarily “over and done,” due to newly imposed retaliatory Chinese tariffs, Reynolds told SeafoodSource.
U.S. lobster is still heading to China, he said, but via Canada. Exporters there are able to ship lobsters tariff-free into China as long as they are packed in Canada. Chinese imports only require a health certificate, whereas the European Union also requires a catch certificate, making it harder to avoid American duties.
By bringing innovative technology to the Bucksport facility, Greenhead will focus on producing a variety of specialty lobster products under the company’s brand name.
“It’s the way forward for us to create more value out of our lobster. With the door temporarily closing on exports we feel it is time to focus on supplying the Domestic market with the great taste of Maine New Shell lobster in consumer-friendly forms,” Reynolds said.
Greenhead will add 30 to 40 employees at the new facility, which the company is hoping to open by May 2019, he said. Greenhead already operates three buying stations in Stonington, and it opened a distribution center in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 2016.
Reynolds said his company chose to locate in the Buckstown Heritage Park, a business park in Bucksport, because of its infrastructural capacity and location.
“Bucksport was attractive to us because of its location close to our base in Stonington, and because the town has done a great job with infrastructure, including sewer and water – it’s now one of the best towns for that on the coast of Maine. This is as close to Stonington as we could get a site with proper municipal infrastructure.” Reynolds said. “Logistically, it’s within a stone’s throw of Route 1, where all the trucks are going anyway. And it’s a very welcoming town.”
Reynolds said its merely a coincidence that he chose to locate in the same town as Whole Oceans, a start-up seeking to build a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) salmon farm at the site of a former paper mill in Bucksport.
The Bangor Daily News reported that another seafood business, Pemaquid Mussel Farms, will open a mussel-bagging operation in Bucksport in September, creating an additional six to 10 jobs.
Photo courtesy of National Fisheries Institute
