April 26, 2021 — Specialty foods distributor The Chefs’ Warehouse has acquired substantially all of the assets of M.F. Foley Company (Foley Fish).
The 100-year-old New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based processor and distributor Foley Fish has been struggling since the start of the pandemic due to its heavy reliance on foodservice business.
December 1, 2020 — Like most other seafood processors and distributors, New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based Foley Fish had to quickly pivot when the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States in early March.
The 114-year-old company supplies retail, foodservice, and consumer accounts across the country, but the coronavirus proved an existential threat to the company’s existence.
May 18, 2020 — Jared Auerbach first saw the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in early January, when seafood orders from Boston’s Chinatown — and Chinatowns across the country — slowly stopped coming in.
At first, the founder of Red’s Best, a Boston-based seafood distributor, wasn’t too worried.
“The second week of March, we were down about 20 percent,” he said. “Things were starting to get a little weird. We got through the weekend and I lost some sleep over the weekend, but I felt good.”
On March 17, restaurants in Mass. were ordered to shutdown, and Auerbach, who founded Red’s Best in 2008, saw his business fall out from under him as he made the difficult decision to furlough the vast majority of his staff. For someone who spent years intently focused on balancing the supply of the sea with the demand of the public — many of them restaurant chefs — he now wondered: “What’s our contingency plan?”