🔒Downeast seafood company advances plan to process Jonah crab

A Downeast seafood startup was awarded a $1.25 million interest-free loan to invest in infrastructure needed to buy, process and sell Jonah crab — which is typically thrown back by lobster fishermen.

Bold Coast Seafood, in the Hancock County coastal village of Prospect Harbor, received the loan from Maine Technology Institute’s Maine Technology Asset Fund.

The award required a $2.25 million match, which will come from revenue generated by Bold Coast’s lobster processing business.

The loan will go toward equipment and the match will go toward salaries for additional employees and toward research on Jonah crab in collaboration with Steven Jury, an animal physiologist at Saint Joseph’s College in Standish.

Jonah crab is a native species that is legally harvested in lobster traps but largely thrown back into the ocean alive because, up to this point, Maine had lacked processing capacity.

Former sardine plant

Bold Coast Seafood was established last year when Curt Brown and Betsy Lowe, formerly of Ready Seafood, and Pete Daley, formerly of Garbo Lobster and Acadia Seafood, bought the former Stinson Seafood sardine cannery at 200 Main St. in Prospect Harbor at auction in September 2025.

The purchase and sale agreement allowed the three partners to begin working out of the facility in May 2025. Investment into the building included roof fixes and buying and installing equipment to chill seawater needed to fill the facility’s three large holding tanks.

The holding tanks allowed the partners to start operations, buying live lobster from coops and wharfs along the coast and selling mainly to processors and also direct to retailers around the country.

The 100,000-square-foot facility on 13 acres has a deep-water dock, buying station, refrigerated tanks capable of holding over 200,000 pounds of lobsters and crabs, a state-of-the-art processing floor, loading bays for tractor-trailers, office space and a research lab.

The company has 20 employees, a number expected to grow in the next few years.

“This region is so vital to Maine’s marine economy, but underserved from a logistics perspective,” said Brown. “We saw this facility as an opportunity to make an investment in the working waterfront of Downeast Maine.”

The facility is well set up to accommodate live and processed lobster, crab and scallops, he said. Goals include buying and selling scallops during the winter season.

A selling point of the property was that it came with four wells, on about 65 acres, about a mile from the property, that provide a sustainable water supply for processing.

The facility came with an existing lease with Wyman’s, a Milbridge-based producer of wild blueberries and blueberry products.

“Other than the Wyman’s lease, the facility had been dormant for five years,” said Brown.

Crab processing

The goal from the beginning has been to set up processing capability for both lobster and Jonah crab.

The Maine coast has a healthy Jonah crab resource and customers are looking for its meat, said Brown.

The missing link is processing, he said. Bold Coast is working on filling that gap.

“That is the opportunity that differentiates this facility from others we were looking at," he said.

Jonah crab is in demand by customers around the country, said Brown. But the vast majority of Jonah crabs are thrown back into the ocean alive because Maine lacks processing capacity.

Bold Coast seeks to solve the problem by purchasing, processing and selling the crustacean, which could boost the bottom line of harvesters, generate over $10 million in new revenue, create new careers and gain market share around the country with a healthy, sustainable, and delicious new item from the coast of Maine, according to the award announcement.

Equipment lines

With the loan, the team is evaluating a couple of brands of equipment lines — including a cooker, picking equipment and freezer — that would allow them to process both crab and lobster.

Seafood processing has come a long way in the last 10 to 15 years, he said.

“We’re excited to bring that to our facility and, hopefully, add value to the whole supply chain,” Brown said.

The partners expect to decide on and order the equipment within the coming few weeks, for installation by early summer and trial runs for lobster after that, followed by crab in the fall through winter, when their shells firm up.

Crab capacity is expected to be 30,000 to 40,000 pounds per day, three to four days per week from October through March. There will be an opportunity to scale up the equipment from there.

Lobster buying, packing and distribution will continue unabated, with millions of pounds expected this year to move through the facility.

Crab customers include lobster roll chains looking to add a new line in the form of crab rolls, soup companies that can use crab meat for bisque and retailers nationwide, said Brown.

Bold Coast also has a science and education outreach mission that’s based on the past decade of industry-academia collaboration to shed light on the earliest life stages of the lobster life cycle. Brown has long been a partner in that initiative.

“We’ll ramp that up as part of this facility,” he said.