Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Seafood company’s future in question

January 16, 2017 — Illinois-based Mazzetta Co. remains mute on the fate of its Gloucester Seafood Processing subsidiary, but a state agency on Friday confirmed it has spent about five months helping place workers laid off from the Blackburn Industrial Park facility.

Ken Messina, business service manager of the state’s Executive Office of Workforce Development, said staffers from his agency’s Rapid Response Team first began working with GSP management in August and were at the seafood processing plant as recently as last week.

“We were able to help them with their layoff situation,” Messina said. “Last week was the last meeting that we had up there. For us, it was the end of the closure.”

Officials from Mazzetta, based in Highland Park, Illinois, have not responded to multiple requests for comment, so it is unclear whether the layoffs — which Messina pegged at about 175 — will lead to the international seafood company completely shuttering the Gloucester business it opened in 2015.

Silence from the top

Gloucester Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken on Friday said she hasn’t heard a word from Mazzetta or local GSP officials since she met with GSP executive Dave Fitzgerald about three months ago at City Hall.

“They didn’t say anything about layoffs then and they didn’t say anything about closing,” Romeo Theken said. “They don’t call the city when they’re laying people off. They call the city when they’re closing and I have not received a phone call from them saying they’re shutting the doors.”

Romeo Theken conceded she also heard reports from constituents about large layoffs at GSP, but was unaware the state’s Executive Office of Workforce Development had been working with the company for five months.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Hometown team running new fish plant

May 9, 2016 — Gloucester Seafood Processing Inc. is based in Gloucester. It is a stand-alone subsidiary of Mazzetta Co., which is not.

Problem?

Well, this is Gloucester, where life tends to be a tad provincial, as you might expect from a city that coined the phrase “up the line” to deal with the remainder of the North American continent.

It’s not surprising then that the arrival of Gloucester Seafood Processing about a year ago at the former Good Harbor Filet plant in the Blackburn Industrial Park was greeted with a measure of uncertainty and — in some quarters — downright suspicion and veiled whispers of carpet-bagging.

“The whole thing, while the place was being set up, was that we wanted it run by local people,” said Dave Fitzgerald, the New Zealander brought in by Highland Park, Illinois-based Mazzetta for the plant’s startup. “You see some of those comments about, ‘Here’s that company from Chicago’s going to take everything out of here.’ It’s not that. It’s a locally run company.”

Fitzgerald, as he uttered those words, sat at the head of a table in a conference room inside Gloucester Seafood Processing’s administrative offices, surrounded by front office colleagues, all of whom are sons and daughters of Gloucester.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times