GOULDSBORO, Maine — May 5, 2014 — For the past year and a half, two regional seafood distributors have been working together to create the largest lobster processing plant in the state.
And much to the relief of local residents, the two have been doing it quietly, with little fanfare or drama.
Maine Fair Trade Lobster, a partnership between East Coast Seafood and Garbo Lobster, is expanding its operations and finishing up about $3 million worth of renovations at the former Stinson Seafood cannery. In early May, the company plans to resume production at the plant with nearly 200 employees, roughly 50 percent more than the 130 workers it employed last year.
“This is a huge undertaking,” Michael Tourkistas, president and CEO of East Coast Seafood, said recently in one of the few interviews he has given since his company became a co-owner of the plant more than a year and a half ago. “It takes a lot of experience to navigate through the ups and downs.”
It is not clear to what extent the jobs in Gouldsboro are expected to be seasonal. Most Maine lobster processing plants greatly reduce production, or close down altogether, in the winter when the state’s lobster landings slow to a trickle. But Tourkistas said he hopes to coordinate the facility’s operation with its sister Paturel processing plant in Deer Island, New Brunswick, where the Canadian lobster season occurs in the winter.
From 2010 through 2012, Gouldsboro had a steady diet of angst and apprehension as the ownership and continued operation of the longtime seafood processing plant in the local village of Prospect Harbor came into doubt.
In February 2010, Bumble Bee Foods decided to shut down the former Stinson Seafood plant, which was the last sardine cannery operating in the United States, putting nearly 130 people out of work. After moving the canning equipment across the border to its Connors Bros. subsidiary in Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, and spending months searching for a new buyer, Bumble Bee found one: an upstart lobster distributor from Chelsea, Massachusetts, that was looking to break into the processing business.