Interstate commerce: Maine's business ties with NH are growing in surprising directions

Expanding from Maine to New Hampshire next door isn’t always easy, even from a few miles away — as Saco River Brewing in Fryeburg can attest.

Barred from trucking its own beer across state lines to the Granite State, it started selling there in early April via Westbrook-based Vacationland Distributors LLC while selling mainly canned IPAs at its taproom purchased online for curbside pickup and distributing to 80 wholesale accounts in Maine. Business is booming on both sides of the border.

“Our distribution in New Hampshire started right when everything shut down, and it’s worked out great,” says Ryan Vincent, who owns Saco River with founder Mason Irish. “We’re not sitting on any beer and selling out every two weeks with our distribution in Maine and New Hampshire.”

Vacationland founder and owner Nick Bezanson is seeing the same trend, saying: “Their beer is flying off the shelves up there.”

That’s no mean feat in the eyes of Maine Brewers’ Guild Executive Director Sean Sullivan, who notes, “Selling beer across state lines is not something that people do casually. It has to be well thought-out.”

That task completed, Saco River and Vacationland have big plans for their new partnership — just one manifestation of growing business links between the two states. Examples abound in sectors from manufacturing to retail, as well as financial and professional services.

Photo / Tim Greenway

Saco River Brewing co-owners Mason Irish, left, and Ryan Vincent in their brewery in Fryeburg

Connections are especially close between Kittery and Portsmouth, on either side of the Piscataqua River, and between Fryeburg and North Conway, N.H., home to outlet and other retail shopping.

“Both states play off each other very well,” says Chris Ferrigno, a trained scientific glass blower who owns the Great Atlantic Puffin Co., a medical marijuana dispensary, and Four Seasons Horitculture Supply in Fryeburg. “You have residents of Maine that use New Hampshire for certain things, and New Hampshire residents that use Maine for certain things.” Fryeburg residents frequently hop over the border to shop at Hannaford and Walmart, for example.

“It’s a lot easier to go to North Conway than it is to Windham,” he adds.

Law and accounting

It’s not just border businesses that benefit from geography. In the professional services industry, Portland-based firms with a longstanding New Hampshire footprint include law firm Pierce Atwood, where partner Michele Kenney heads a 17-attorney team, and accounting firm Baker Newman Noyes, with more than 25 employees in Portsmouth. Both have offices at the Pease International Trade Center business park in a former Air Force base that are currently empty as everyone works remotely.

The firm opened a Manchester, N.H., office in 1999, but its most recent forays have been to Massachusetts, planting a flag in Boston in 2010 and Woburn in 2019.

In Portsmouth since 2003, Baker Newman Noyes finds the waterfront town to be a “great bridge between Maine and Massachusetts,” says the firm’s managing principal, Dayton Benway. He says the proximity to Boston is useful in recruiting job candidates from there, especially those with ties to Maine or New Hampshire — and hopes to be busy on that front again soon, saying: “We have a temporary freeze right now, but I feel like we’re getting close to lifting that.”

At Pierce Atwood, Kenney says that while there are no specific hiring objectives at the moment, “we are always in the market for exceptional legal talent if we feel that it is complementary and a good fit.”

High-powered high fliers

Mergers and acquisitions are another route into New Hampshire.

In March, Mega Industries LLC, a Gorham-based manufacturer of microwave components used in military, research and medical applications, acquired Ferrite Microwave Technologies LLC, based in Nashua, N.H. Terms were not disclosed. Ferrite makes microwave components mainly for medical and some military uses and microwave heating systems for large meat processing companies.

The companies merged their assets to form a new holding company, based in Gorham, called Microwave Technologies LLC, while keeping the Mega Industries and Ferrite brand names for their products. The combined entity has a combined workforce of 110, of which 66 are from Mega Industries and the rest with Ferrite.

As of mid-May, the merger was about 80% complete, according to Peter V. Anania, president of Mega Industries, a portfolio company of his Portland-based investment firm, Anania & Associates LLC.

“We’re in the phase of getting the accounting systems coordinated,” he reports. “All is going well.”

Initially, about 10 Ferrite employees will be moved from New Hampshire to Maine, and in the longer term Anania sees the overall workforce expanding.

“I would love to see us grow in terms of employees,” he says. “Once we get the integration done and we get past this COVID situation, I expect the market to come back very strong and we can grow even further,” particularly in selling systems for government-funded scientific research projects. “It might be a year or two away, but we’ll see a lot of those projects getting funded.”

He says the merged entity has about 25% of the global high-power microwave systems and components market, which he estimates to be in the billions of dollars.

The firms’ business relationship goes back more than a decade. While two previous rounds of merger talks did not lead to a deal, the third time was the charm with Mega’s offer in late 2019 that Ferrite accepted.

Anania, who will be chairman of the new holding company, says that closing the deal posed no major challenges except for defense contract timing issues, and the fact that Mega Industries changed banks in the middle of the talks.

Peter Tibbetts, a Colby College physics alumnus who serves as CEO of Ferrite and Microwave Technologies, says the companies complement each other well in terms of the components they make, which he describes with a plumbing metaphor: “In Gorham they make the pipe, in Nashua we make the valves.”

As for recruiting, Tibbetts says the plan has always been to hire in Maine, and expects to have some job losses in New Hampshire as work shifts from one site to another. Though four positions are currently open, he says they’d take on additional hires if they find the right individuals.

He knows it won’t be easy, saying, “Hiring of engineers is very difficult for a small company, especially since young engineers typically gravitate to larger companies.”

On the plus side, Tibbetts says he’s impressed that Mega Industries was able to hire two engineers in the past few months, both thanks to personal contacts: “We do see a lot of resumes, but we wait to find good people.”

Hannaford and Hancock Lumber

In the retail sector, Scarborough-based Hannaford Bros. has been in the New Hampshire market for about 50 years.

It employs around 10,000 in Maine and 5,000 in New Hampshire, where it has 36 stores including one in North Conway. The most recent store to open in New Hampshire was in Bedford in 2016.

Hannaford spokesman Eric Blom says that while stores in the two states are similar in many ways, the key difference is the origin of local products available to shoppers in each state.

“We are committed to partnering with vendors as local to our stores as possible, resulting in more New Hampshire-based products in our New Hampshire stores and more Maine-based products in our Maine stores. This is the result of direct-to-store deliveries from local farmers and food producers.” Elsewhere, Hannaford has 50 stores in New York, 17 in Vermont and 16 in Massachusetts.

More recent to the New Hampshire market is Casco-headquartered building materials supplier Hancock Lumber, which has had a store, or lumberyard, in North Conway since 2010.

“New Hampshire is super-important for our sellers and builders who live close to the border,” says Kevin Hancock, chairman and CEO of the family-owned firm established in 1848. “Their work regularly crosses the border.”

Hancock says he’s not paid much attention to differences in how the two states responded to the COVID-19 crisis and are reopening their economies, saying, “Everybody is doing the best they can with a tough situation.”

He also says that his firm’s Kennebunk location serves lots of customers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts as well as Maine, where it has nine stores, three sawmills, a truss plant called Mainely Trusses in Fairfield and a home office in Casco, for a total of 14 locations. It owns more than 12,000 acres of timberland.

As an essential business during the pandemic, Hancock Lumber has kept all 530 employees coming in to work every day since the middle of March, adapted for physical distancing and other precautions.

Hancock, a self-described optimist by nature, says that while some home renovation project work slowed in the last couple of months, it is starting to pick up again.

“The construction industry before COVID-19 was really in a good place, so we had good momentum coming into this,” he says. “In the long run, COVID-19 probably enhances the importance of how people feel about home. Home is really a bit of a sanctuary for people, so I think housing is probably actually becoming more important in people’s minds. In the short run, this is a big challenge for the economy, but in the long run, Maine and all of us here are very resourceful, and we can do this.”

Getting grander in the Granite state

Back at Saco River Brewing in Fryeburg, Vincent says that while he would have preferred to enter New Hampshire sooner, plans were held up until recently because out-of-state brewers aren’t allowed to truck their own beer there.

Then along came Vacationland Distributors, a 15-employee firm founded in 2014 with a growing portfolio that even boasts some Belgian names. But it was a brand from Vermont — Lawson’s Finest Liquids — that impressed Vincent, a Vermont native now living in Albany Township, near Bethel.

Photo / Tim Greenway

Nick Bezanson, founder and owner of Vacationland Distributors, recently helped Saco River Brewing, of Fryeburg, expand into New Hampshire.

“We used to track down their Sip of Sunshine IPA when it was being released. I thought, ‘If Lawson’s trusts these guys, they must be doing something right.’”

While the original thought was to start with North Conway about 10 miles away, Vincent says the distribution reach is already “a lot further than we expected,” from Littleton at the northern edge of the White Mountains down to Manchester and Portsmouth.

“It’s kind of blown my mind that during this really unfortunate time, we’ve been able to push our brand when normally we might not be able to do that, and ease into it without the stress of having to keep the kegs and tap room open,” Vincent says. “It’s allowed us to get into New Hampshire and start building our relationships with beer stores.”

The brewer has grand plans for an even further reach into Maine’s neighbor to the west.

“At some point,” Vincent says,” we’re hoping we’ll be from the top of New Hampshire to the bottom of New Hampshire.”

Photo / Courtesy of Saco River Brewing

Sales for Saco River Brewing, based in Fryeburg, are brisk on both sides of the Maine-New Hampshire border, the owners say.

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