November 10, 2021 — Every weekday morning at 9, Cassie Canastra sits in a little conference room in a big warehouse on the edge of New Bedford’s harbor.
On the wall above her is a large video screen full of numbers, prices, and weights for batches of scallops. In front of her sit boat captains eager to sell their catch. And in the refrigerated warehouse out back are huge containers of scallops — as much as 1,500 pounds in a batch — that have been shucked at sea and loaded straight off the boats overnight, examined by buyers in the morning, and delivered to nearby processing plants by afternoon.
The numbers on the screen tick up and down, 5 cents at a time, as bids come in from fish buyers all over town. The captains grumble, or do quick math on their cellphone calculators, subtracting the costs of fuel and other expenses to see how much they’ll earn for their days at sea. The final price — $22.05 per pound on Friday morning for one 1,357-pound batch of large scallops fished off the coast of southern New Jersey — eventually translates into what you pay for scallops at a supermarket or restaurant.
“We basically set the price for scallops all over the world right here,” said Canastra, whose father and uncle founded the auction house in 1994. “That’s pretty cool.”
Indeed, this nondescript warehouse is a key point in a global scallop trade that courses through New Bedford, powering the city’s fishing industry and its economy in general. More than $350 million worth of the meaty shellfish land here in a typical year, making scallops, as New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell puts it, the “cash crop” of the most lucrative fishing port in the United States.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe