Washington County Seafood Dealer Delivers Local, Fresh and Traceable Maine Seafood to Mainers
Sheehan’s Seafood, a new enterprise operated by Gulf of Maine, Inc, in Pembroke, Me. has a new vehicle bringing fresh seafood to eastern Maine and Aroostook County residents. Billed as a ‘seafood buyers club,’ the company buys from local fishers / harvesters and sells to restaurants, individuals, buying clubs and anyone else interested in locally harvested fresh seafood. Tim & Amy Sheehan have been in business 20 years and say that local sourcing provides customers with truly fresh seafoods. Their products also include a bit of the ‘story’ on their labels. The harvesters name, town, boat, and where the product was harvested. Their sales locations, schedules, and specials are spread by way of social media with constant updates on Facebook and Twitter or via Texting # 41411, CFOOD directly.
Initially the company started selling the ever-popular lobster and steamer clams. Other seafoods will soon be available such as haddock, salt fish, scallops, mussels, and oysters. Not surprisingly, they have found restaurants very eager to have access to local seafoods. Tim Sheehan said that he found it “unbelievable that on so much of the coast of Maine, right on the waters edge, that fresh fish and shellfish are largely unavailable to the general public”. He said that for many Mainers – the supermarket is the only place to access seafood. “Many people have no idea that often those products could have been fished in Mass, NH, or Canada then trucked to Boston, sold to a distributor and resold to the large grocery store chains. This ‘plastic encased seafood’ has typically been out of the water for days or even a week, treated to retard decay, and lacks the look, feel and aroma of distinctly fresh seafood.
With the success of this pilot project, the Sheehan’s plan to expand their seafood service along the coast with a small fleet of trucks and to move inland to areas like Bangor. “People want to know where their food is coming from. They want to know that they are doing the right thing by spending their money to help local producers. We provide a very fresh product, and we pay our best harvesters well. This all comes full circle for the Maine economy. It is providing a good quality product with a story of the hard working fishing families of Maine. Customers like this.”
The Sheehans work with fishers / harvesters to get the best product. Transactions with harvesters are about a ‘fair-trade’ price, rather than ‘market price.’ According to Tim, ‘market price’ means ‘slowly going out of business price’ or ‘how low do you dare to go’ price. Boston and NYC markets love to pit dealers against dealers and the fishermen against each other. “That’s how they get rich!”, Sheehan said. “We want to be sustainable with the resource, the harvesters and our customers. Compare our prices and quality with the super markets. They can’t compete and we love it.”