The Maine Import Export Lobster Dealers Association

by Sandra Dinsmore

Maine lobster dealers had a dealers association for a number of years. The Maine Import Export Lobster Dealers Association (MIELDA) started in the late 1970s, according to founding member and eventual president Robert Brown of Bremen’s Lusty Lobster, Inc.

Back then, Brown said, many of the Maine dealers had relatives in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia who supplied them with product. Unfortunately some Canadian fishing areas produce lobsters that weigh less than 1 lb. Although these lobsters are legal in Canada and can be part of a Canadian crate run, they are illegal in Maine. The lobsters in a Canadian crate run ranged in size, Brown said, “from under 1 lb. to as big as they get.

“Some were too small and some too large for our measure,” Brown recalled. “We had to come up with some sort of a plan that the Department of Marine Resources (DMR) would agree to that would allow the dealers, when they received some illegal product in a truckload, to get rid of it.”

The Maine dealers convinced the DMR to give them the right to have export permits. Brown said, “We had to keep any lobsters illegal in Maine sealed in specific crates marked that they were illegal for sale in Maine.” Once the illegal Canadian lobsters were set aside and so labeled the Maine dealers could later ship them to states where they were legal.

The dealers imported lobster from Canada and exported the illegal-in-Maine canners, hence the name of their association. Then, too, being able to sell those canners out of state helped dealers keep customers all year. As Brown noted, “The Maine catch became practically nothing in the wintertime. Hardly anybody fished. Customers want year-round supply.” The Maine import and export dealers, at a loss to their businesses, obliged out-of-state customers with Canadian lobster. They were happy to oblige Virginia Atwood, aunt of now retired Spruce Head dealer William Atwood who, Brown said, helped both the dealer group and Rockland’s Lobster Seafood Festival. Virginia Atwood asked MIELDA members to sell their 1 to 1 ¼ lb. lobsters to the lobster festival. As the Rockland Lobster festival has grown in numbers and popularity over the years, both groups benefited from Atwood’s promotional expertise.

Asked the group’s other accomplishments, Brown said, “We were in favor of the Lobster Institute and backed that, and we were in favor of the first Lobster Promotion Council, and we backed that. And we became much closer to the Maine Lobster Dealers Association, and we backed them. And we became closer to some of the Boston dealers. The Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association was very helpful in meeting with dealers to speak about different things that were taking place.”

New government agencies were coming into force in the New England states, and Brown said that when the Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire lobster dealers could get together and send representatives to cover meetings that were being held, they had an effect on some of the programs the states were trying to put through that didn’t make sense to the lobster dealers.

At the beginning, Brown recalled, MIELDA was made up of businesses from the Rockland, Spruce Head, and Tenants Harbor area, and the dues were about $50 per year. It was an area group of lobster dealers that grew into a coast-wide group. Brown said, “In the heyday we probably had 25 members or so.” The group’s heyday was in the 1990s, said Brown, who served as spokesperson in those years. By then, too, dues had risen to $100 a year. But as Portland lobster dealer and former MIELDA president Peter McAleney of New Meadows Lobster recalled, “Nobody knew anybody back then. You only knew them on the phone. You never met anybody.” Scarborough retail lobster dealer and MLDA secretary Susan Bayley Clough, of Bayley’s Lobster Pound, who started attending meetings with her father around 1988, kind of agreed, saying, “It was a pretty loose organization at the time. They didn’t have regular meetings, but got together mainly if a specific regulatory issue popped up.”

By 2000 to 2010, Brown said, the organization started going downhill and by the early teens had become essentially defunct.