From the late 1800s through the late 1900s, New England was home to multiple seafood canneries.
"So the last one closed, I think it was in Eastport Maine. It closed in 2009," Chris Sherman said. He's with Island Creek Oysters, a Duxbury-based company best known for their farmed shellfish and caviar.
In recent years, the company has gotten more and more interested in making its own canned seafood. Island Creek director of operations Robert Chen says this started with a trip to Europe, where Island Creek staff noticed that people there eat a lot more seafood than Americans:
"You go over to countries like Spain and Portugal. Their per capita intake is about, you know, 50 plus pounds a year and they eat most of that out of a tin, where here, it's about 18 pounds, and it's shrimp, salmon, tuna," Robert said.
Americans have a notoriously strange relationship with seafood. We control more ocean than any other country, and yet most of the seafood we eat is imported — between 70 and 85 percent depending on the year. We often trade high-quality wild species like bay scallops for mediocre farmed shrimp, because that’s what a lot of Americans are used to eating. But with the growth of the local food movement and the recent uptick in shellfish consumption, Sherman and Chen are betting that a local seafood cannery might be able to help change this.
"One of the things we’ve got is good proximity to wild fisheries, to good aquaculture you know whether it’s salmon, shellfish, or mussels or whatever, so that we see as our kind of competitive advantage is being able to buy some of the stuff here that you can’t get in a can in the market right now, so that’s kind of going to be our niche as we see it," Chris Sherman said.
State officials are excited about the idea of keeping the value chain close to home when it comes to Massachusetts seafood. Island Creek got a food security and infrastructure grant during the COVID-19 pandemic to get started building a cannery in New Bedford, and then started talking with canning consultants from across the country. Very quickly, they realized what they were proposing was going to be at a very different scale from most American canneries.
"Cause here in the U.S. it’s like, the canneries are like, we went to Ocean Spray out in Canosha, Wisconsin, they do 400,000 cans of cranberry sauce a day, you know so these guys, this is like a micro R and D cannery for them, it’s a joke," Chris explained.
But for Sherman and Chen, the small size is kind of the point. The canneries they’ve visited in Europe are small and working with local product, and that’s how canneries in New England used to be too. The Island Creek cannery in New Bedford is hoping to start by producing about a quarter million cans of tinned seafood in its first year, and slowly work up to full capacity, which is probably around 2 million cans annually. And they’ll make two categories of tins — some canned seafood that’s meant to be used as an ingredient in other recipes and some that comes already prepared for a picnic. Sherman sees producing cans filled with local products like butter clams or razor clams as a way not only to get New Englanders to eat more seafood, but also to connect more of us to our local fishing and aquaculture communities.
"You know, we see our mission is kind of brokering the relationship with coastal communities and Joe Consumer to try to get — build value in those communities and you know get behind kind of new products, Chris said."
"And we also like the only way to ensure traceability and good practices throughout the value chain is to own it yourself. So we've decided to take the plunge, see how it goes!"
It's an experiment.
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Find out more about the history of seafood canneries in New England.
