Law change opens up lobster sales
Photo/Time Greenway
Emily Lane, export manager for Portland Shellfish, in the company's lobster picking room
Portland Shellfish Co. just began taking orders for lobster claws in the shell, a tidy serving option that’s popular for cocktail parties and receptions. Thanks to a new law, the company can actually fill the requests, just two years after attracting scrutiny from regulators for selling the very same product.
For decades, Maine law prohibited the sale of lobster claws, split tails and other parts, for fear that harvesters could break off and sell the parts from illegally caught lobsters. Marine Patrol officers can confirm the legal size of a whole lobster, after all, but can only guess at the original measurements of a lobster based solely on a claw.
The vividly termed “lobster mutilation laws” prevented Maine processors from competing with their Canadian counterparts, which could legally sell the products. Millions of pounds of lobster have been shipped over the border every year, processed in Canada and shipped back out as value-added products, often right back to Maine. Of the $110 million
worth of live lobster the state exported last year, more than $100 million went to Canada, according to the Maine International Trade Center.
But as of July 1, Maine’s lobster processors can sell whole claws and knuckles in the shell, split tails and other formerly banned products. “It is very significant because it allows us to market new products,” says Emily Lane, board president of the Maine Lobster Council and export sales manager for Portland Shellfish. “It puts us on an equal playing field with the Canadian processors who are allowed to process these parts.”
Along with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, Lane was instrumental in crafting the new law, LD 1593, which was sponsored by state House Speaker Hannah Pingree. Two years in the making, the law could dramatically boost Maine’s lobster industry, which last year hauled in 78 million pounds of the crustaceans worth roughly $228 million.
Wave of change
In 2007, Portland Shellfish was celebrating the success of an award at the Brussels Seafood Show for its new lobster claw products. A year later, Cozy Harbor Seafood, another Portland processor, struck a deal with Hannaford Bros. Co. to sell whole lobster claws. But unbeknownst to either company, the products violated Maine law and were later pulled from the market.
At the time, the only lobster products legal to sell in Maine were whole lobsters, whole and intact lobster tails in the shell (a conversion formula could be used to determine the lobster’s original size) and meat picked from the shell. Processors interpreted the mutilation laws as applying only to harvesters, but soon learned otherwise. “They did make it difficult for the processors to deal with new products,” Col. Joe Fessenden, chief of the state’s marine law enforcement, says of the old laws.
Processors supported the rules’ role in maintaining a sustainable fishery, but urged changes to allow for healthier competition with Canada, particularly as the recession weakened demand. Another catalyst for change was the Governor’s Task Force on the Economic Sustainability of Maine’s Lobster Industry, which commissioned a report in 2009 that recommended redrafting the mutilation laws to “allow processors to offer products to the marketplace in a manner that allows Maine companies to compete in key markets and still ensures harvesting laws that protect the stock are enforced.”
The new law stipulates that only legal-sized lobsters are covered under the regulations and imposes stringent record-keeping on processors, Fessenden says. The state’s primary players — Portland Shellfish, Cozy Harbor and Shucks Maine Lobster in Richmond — are major companies that won’t risk getting caught processing illegally sized or egg-bearing lobsters, he says. “Most of these outfits are well-established businesses, and they’re not going to monkey around with that,” he says. “There’s too much at stake.”
Since the law took effect, the Department of Marine Resources has sold four lobster processor licenses and four tails-only licenses, according to Deirdre Gilbert, special assistant to the commissioner. The licenses cost $500 and $159 per year, respectively.
Not among the license-seekers was Live Lobster Co., the Massachusetts company that announced in early August plans to buy the shuttered former Stinson Seafood cannery in Prospect Harbor from Bumble Bee Foods and turn it into a lobster processing facility. In mid-August, a federal court judge in Boston issued a preliminary injunction against Live Lobster stipulating that any purchase agreements the company enters into are subject to cancellation by the court. The injunction was granted at the request of former general manager Alan Brown, who has filed a lawsuit against Live Lobster for unfair termination.
The law also allows processors to request waivers for specialty items such as medallions made from lobster meat. As law enforcement and regulators become more familiar with such products, they could be incorporated into the new license. “It gives Marine Patrol officers a heads up as to what to look for when they go to processing facilities,” says Lane of Portland Shellfish.
Her company has already filled several orders for the newly allowed products, and Lane says she expects a marketing push soon to advertise the new offerings. “It’s still early,” she says.
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