Maine shrimp going abroad

PORTLAND – A local seafood processor and marketer is expanding its shrimp operations to meet demand in Europe for Maine shrimp products.

As shrimp season gets under way in the Gulf of Maine, Cozy Harbor Seafood is ramping up production in hopes of selling 1 million pounds of cooked and peeled shrimp worth $4 million in Europe.

The company is filling a niche as the only U.S. processor of cooked and peeled cold-water shrimp, said John Norton, the company’s president and chief executive officer.

Maine in the 1990s had a larger overseas market for shrimp. But that was before the shrimp population began declining and regulators shortened the fishing season to a fraction of what it had been.

With shrimp stocks again on the rise and the shrimp season extended to 70 days this winter, Norton is confident enough to have invested nearly $900,000 in the past two years to increase his capacity.

“We’re looking at it for the long haul,” he said. “It’s a long process trying to win back some of the markets Maine used to have.”

Cozy Harbor sells seafood products to supermarket chains, wholesalers and food service distributors. Its latest foray into shrimp stems from meetings last year in the United Kingdom, when Norton accompanied Gov. John Baldacci and other businessmen on a trade mission.

Norton had gone over to sell frozen lobster to supermarkets and wholesale buyers, but they told him they were looking for shrimp products.

So last winter, Norton invested $450,000 in the equipment to get back into the shrimp market. He sold $2 million worth of Maine shrimp, mostly in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia. This year, he is spending another $400,000 to increase processing capacity by 30 percent and upgrade freezers at the plant.

Setting up a shrimp processing plant from scratch could cost up to $15 million, Norton said, but Cozy Harbor has been able to save money because it is already set up to process frozen lobster from June to December, when it employs up to 145 people.

Now that lobster processing is finished for the season, workers have been converting the line to handle shrimp during the next three months. Roughly 100 people will be needed for the processing, which is expected to begin this week.

Because Maine is at the southern end of the range for the cold-water species, the shrimp harvested here tend to be larger than the ones Europeans buy from traditional sources such as Norway, Denmark and Canada.

“Maine shrimp are highly valued in Scandinavia and northern Europe,” said Janine Bisaillon-Carey, vice president of the Maine International Trade Center in Portland.