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Glenn Cooke: “It’s time for suppliers and producers to totally cut Russia off”

March 17, 2022 — Glenn Cooke is the CEO of Cooke Inc., a vertically integrated family of seafood companies based in Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, Canada. He spoke to SeafoodSource on Tuesday, 15 March, at the 2022 Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

SeafoodSource: What have been Cooke’s big moves over the past few months?

Cooke: We’re always investing in our operations globally and we just launched a vessel for Argentine red shrimp fishery with the capability to do frozen-at-sea product, which is quite exciting, as we’ll be in this year’s fishery there. It’s a state-of-the-art vessel. We’re in the process of finalizing a new USD 45 million (EUR 40.5 million) plant in St. George, New Brunswick for salmon added-value processing that will be very robotized, automatic, and cut down our labor costs, which we have do because of a shortage of [workers]. The facility that’s there will be replaced by a brand-new facility and the one that’s there will be redone into a secondary value-added processing center. And we have a new smolt unit almost ready to be finalized as well in New Brunswick. Around the world, we are expanding our operations – we’re always investing heavily globally and we’ll continue to do that.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Glenn Cooke, Ian Smith offer timeline for COVID-19 foodservice recovery

February 9, 2021 — The global COVID-19 pandemic has been a mixed bag for the seafood industry, with retailers notching record seafood sales and the category as a whole seeing gains, even as the foodservice industry virtually collapsed.

That downturn is expected to change direction this year, with foodservice operators optimistic about 2021. Seafood company CEOs and advisors, speaking during the National Fisheries Institute’s Global Seafood Market Conference’s economic outlook panel, also expressed optimism about the industry’s recovery. While in the short-term the rebound may be slight, as trend experts have predicted, once relative normalcy returns demand could see a big boost.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford seafood giant Cooke buys insolvent U.S. fish processor, expands global reach

October 29, 2020 — A division of New Brunswick seafood giant Cooke Inc. has acquired Mariner Seafood LLC of New Bedford, Mass., expanding the family-owned company’s operations in the United States.

True North Seafood, the flagship brand and processing arm of Cooke, purchased Mariner Seafood for US$2.75 million after the U.S. company filed for bankruptcy protection last month. The sale was approved by a Massachusetts court Monday.

The sale includes two processing plants in the port of New Bedford capable of processing more than 8,000 tonnes a year of seafood product, including scallops, haddock, cod, salmon and shrimp.

Glenn Cooke, CEO of Cooke, said it has been a dream of the family seafood company to have a presence in the historic, high-value fishing port.

“We now have over 4,000 Cooke employees in 22 U.S. states and we will continue to invest and grow our New Bedford processing operations,” he said in a statement.

Cooke, which started in rural New Brunswick in 1985 with three employees, now has a global workforce of more than 10,000 employees in 10 countries. It claims to be the largest privately held family seafood company in the world.

Read the full story at the Preeceville Progress

True North completes acquisition of Mariner Seafood assets

October 27, 2020 — True North Seafood, the processing division and flagship brand of Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, Canada-based Cooke Inc., has acquired the business of Mariner Seafood, a seafood processor headquartered in New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Cooke CEO Glenn Cooke confirmed the acquisition in a press release.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Seafood industry applauds Trump’s new executive order, while some groups cry foul

May 8, 2020 — An executive order issued on 7 April by U.S. President Donald Trump containing a number of new mandates intended to enhance the competitiveness of the U.S. seafood has drawn widespread praise from the industry, and has been derided by some environmentalists and fishing groups.

The new executive order contains an array of recommendations for wild-caught fisheries, and an extensive set of new tasks for multiple government administrations intended to expand the nation’s aquaculture. The new changes are devoted to removing barriers to permitting, improving regulatory transparency, and establishing new “Aquaculture Opportunity Areas.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Statement From Glenn Cooke Commending President Donald Trump On His Executive Order That Will Improve US Aquaculture Competitiveness and Economic Growth

May 8, 2020 — The following was released by Glenn Cooke, CEO of Cooke Seafood:

Glenn Cooke, CEO of the Cooke family of companies, provided the following statement after President Donald Trump signed the first ever Executive Order that includes provisions to improve U.S. aquaculture competitiveness and economic growth on Thursday.

“I am very pleased President Trump has recognized that domestic farmed production of aquaculture seafood is vital to help correct the severe trade imbalance and strengthen local food security. This should be viewed as a call to State and local governments that the country is in dire need of domestically produced seafood protein and that they should find ways to support, promote, and expand this essential food sector as other countries have.

As a family company, with marine fish farming operations in Maine and Washington and shellfish farming in North Carolina, and wild fisheries in other states including Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alaska, we are extremely proud of the hard work and dedication that our people put in every day to produce healthy seafood meals for families across the USA. Cooke Aquaculture USA in Maine was very proud to have been chosen as the supplier of sustainably farmed Atlantic salmon for the President’s 2017 inauguration. Our strong operations have shown that aquaculture presents a tremendous opportunity to create thousands of jobs and build vibrant working waterfronts co-existing with traditional fisheries in rural coastal communities.

President Trump and his Executive Agencies are to be commended for their leadership to address the regulatory challenges with establishing seafood farms by revising the National Aquaculture Development Plan and implementing a Nationwide Permit authorizing finfish, seaweed or multi-trophic culture in federal marine waters.”

Read the full release here

Cooke eyes deal for fast-growing Argentinian shrimp firm with Spanish plant

February 20, 2020 — Acquisitive Canadian seafood giant Cooke is eyeing a deal for Grupo Cabo Virgenes, an Argentina-based fishing and processing firm with a plant in Spain, reports Alimarket.

According to the website’s sources, Cooke is looking at buying all Cabo Virgenes’ assets, which include nine vessels and a plant in Argentina, and the value-added factory in Spain, but the talks are in the early stages and a deal is not imminent. Cooke is already operating in Spain, with seabass and seabream farmer Culmarex.

Cabo Virgenes and Cooke were not immediately available for comment to Undercurrent News. 

An Undercurrent source confirmed he’d also heard of the talks. “Cooke needs to enter the Spanish [shrimp] market and Cabo Virgenes is a good operation for starting with wild shrimp in Argentina,” he said.

Cooke has already started to expand in the Argentinian shrimp sector and Glenn Cooke, co-founder and CEO, told Undercurrent last year the company plans more deals. Cooke was previously being linked to a deal for vessels owned by Grupo Conarpesa Continental Armadores de Pesca (Conarpesa), but nothing materialized. The company has also snapped up two Central American shrimp farmers, Seajoy Group and Farallon Aquaculture de Nicaragua.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Cooke opens new AC Covert seafood distribution centre and retail outlet in Nova Scotia

December 3, 2019 — The following was released by AC Covert:

AC Covert, one of Canada’s largest seafood suppliers, is hosting an open house for the local community on Dec. 4th from 2-6pm at it’s new distribution centre and retail outlet at 390 Higney Avenue, located in the Burnside Business Park, Dartmouth, NS.

Since 1938, AC Covert has been the fishmonger supplier of choice for the finest retailers and food service professionals in Atlantic Canada. AC Covert delivers the freshest responsibly sourced and prepared fish to fine dining restaurants, hotels, gastro pubs, professional caterers and retailers locally and across North America.

AC Covert distributors was purchased by the Cooke family in 2008 and now offers over 400 different fresh and frozen seafood products to customers including smoked salmon, lobster, halibut, scallops and much more. The open house on Dec. 4th will feature seafood product samples, special offers and prizes.

“AC Covert now employs 30 people and Cooke spent $5.2 million constructing this new two-story, 26,000 square foot distribution centre and retail outlet where 6 delivery trucks operate from six days a week,” said Glenn Cooke, CEO of Cooke Inc. “This expansion is an integral part of our growth plan and we are part way through investing $112 million in Nova Scotia.”

“Nova Scotia is Canada’s number one seafood supplier and we now export to 80 international markets,” said Keith Colwell, Nova Scotia’s Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture. “We’re home to a diverse range of premium quality seafood and value-added products and it’s wonderful that AC Covert has expanded in our province to distribute products from over 30 Nova Scotia seafood companies.”

“Burnside is the largest industrial park north of Boston and east of Montreal, with almost 2,000 enterprises and approximately 30,000 employees,” said Mayor Mike Savage of Halifax Regional Municipality. “Cooke’s investment in AC Covert shows how our growing community is a beacon for attracting business investment creating local jobs.”

AC Covert is open Monday-Saturday from 8:00 am – 4:00 pm.

JOHN SACKTON: Anti-Salmon Video Shot at Cooke Seafood Escalates Attacks on Farmed Fish

October 9, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Following the release of hidden camera video footage from a Cooke Hatchery in Bingham, Maine, Glenn Cooke issued a statement yesterday saying “I am very sorry that this has happened. We are thoroughly reviewing the footage and we are working closely with the Maine Department of Agriculture to review and ensure all our practices are within compliance. We are speaking with all our employees, and we will institute a rigorous re-training program at our Maine facility.”

His statement is an excellent response to an attack on aquaculture by a militant vegan organization called COK, Compassion over Killing.  This group has 18 people on staff, and in 2017 reported income of around $1.3 million.  20% of their budget goes to undercover videos targeting farming, especially industrialized factory farming.

The organization was founded in 1995, and says its aim is to ‘End the abuse of farmed animals using a variety of strategies including vegetarian outreach, investigations, legal advocacy and publications.’

They are very much part of the movement that has led consumers to demand free-range eggs, minimum standards for space for chickens, and regulations against confinement for breeding sows.

They have won a number of concessions from major restaurant chains who have pledged to adopt higher animal welfare standards and offer vegan menu options.

You can see the video they secretly filmed at the Cooke facility on youtube.  It is not getting a lot of hits, less than 5000 as of today.

It shows employees throwing discarded salmon, and in some cases whacking or stomping on fish.  It also shows some deformities being culled from newly hatched embryos.  The emotional tone of the video is that this is no way to treat fish, which Glenn Cooke has forthrightly acknowledged.

But for the salmon industry, and for seafood in general, this raises a larger question about consumer trends.

Farmed and wild seafood has been under continuous attack for both fishing and farming practices for nearly two generations.  Some of the criticisms about overfishing were made largely by people like the MSC, who love and celebrate fish, with the avowed purpose of ending overfishing, or in the case of ASC, certifying farming, to responsibly increase seafood in the global diet.

But others were made by groups who want to halt all consumption of seafood.  This is the category the Cooke critics fall into.

The problem the industry faces is that our customers, who have major retail and restaurant brands, are very sensitive to pressure groups and emotional appeals, regardless of whether they are based on facts or truth.

As a result, restaurant companies have made many changes in response to animal welfare demands and do not want to become targets of animal rights activists.  Part of Compassion’s strategy is to pressure companies like Subway and others to adopt animal welfare standards and to offer vegan options.  Even McDonald’s is subject to these pressures.

For us, complying with social responsibility has definitely increased costs.  The entire infrastructure of certification and traceability has been added to the costs of fishery management in order to demonstrate our social compliance to our customers.

We have no choice but to continue to make our case for responsible harvesting and husbandry.  This applies across the board, whether it is about lobsters being processed and cooked, wild salmon being crammed in RSW tanks, or farmed salmon raised in net pens.  Anyone on a fishing boat knows that gutting and bleeding fish has a cost to the fish.  But just as in nature, we accept that the pain we cause as a predator is no different to the fish than that caused by a seal or a tuna.  We live in a world where there is a food chain.

We have to be responsible stewards of that food chain.  Without the industry making this case, we are going to lose market share not just to vegetarians or people who will not eat fish under any circumstances but even among those who love fish.

As John Fiorello of Intrafish pointed out, there are two camps in the seafood industry regarding fake fish.  One suggests that the idea of plant-based fish products will always be fringe, and that these products will not make headway with real fish consumers.  I have tended to be in that camp.   People eat fish because they like the taste.  If they don’t eat fish, why would they buy fake fish?

The other camp is those sounding the alarm based on what happened to the dairy industry, where the milk aisle now has almond milk, soymilk, and other non-dairy products taking up space and market share.  In the UK, around 15% of ‘dairy’ sales are non-dairy milk products.  I now feel this is more of a true threat.

My kids are big fish eaters, brought up snacking on things like dried squid from a very young age.  But their spouses are vegetarian, and they have certainly been attracted to the non-meat products like impossible beef.

What surprised me in our discussion of fake seafood was their willingness to consider it, because even though they love fish and shrimp, they also think there is an environmental cost, as they do with meat.  So some of our best fish consumers may be tempted to try these fake products due to their overall view that fishing and aquaculture has an environmental cost that they can mitigate through their food choices.

This makes me think that the trend to hold not just fish but all foods to a higher standard is very real, and it means the entire seafood industry must continue to make the case for our responsibility and commitment to environmental and animal welfare.

Glenn Cooke’s statement is an excellent example of how to respond to this type of accusation.  The company was blindsided by someone recording a secret video.

It does not matter if it was unfair, edited, or secretly taped—the response of the company was to own the mistakes shown on the video, and to promise to do better.

Glenn Cooke said he does not judge people’s dietary choices.  If they don’t want to eat salmon they don’t have to, but regardless of their individual choice, Cooke is assuring all those who do eat farmed salmon that it is grown in a responsible, socially conscious way that respects animal welfare.

These are not issues that are going away.

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It was reprinted with permission.

Lobster Bait Fish Coming to Maine From Uruguay Amid Shortage

July 11, 2019 — Maine’s lobster fishermen will be able to use a new species of bait fish to try to get through a shortage of herring that has troubled the industry in recent years.

Lobstermen typically bait traps with Atlantic herring, but federal fishery regulators have enacted dramatic cutbacks to the catch quotas for that fish. The Maine Department of Marine Resources said Thursday it has approved the blackbelly rosefish as a new species that can be sold and used as lobster bait in the state.

The blackbelly rosefish is an abundant species that ranges from Canada to South America. Cooke Aquaculture, a New Brunswick, Canada-based company, requested Maine’s approval to sell rosefish as bait, and the company announced plans to harvest the fish off Uruguay.

“We believe this is a solution to address concerns from the lobster fishery on the challenges they are currently facing on account of bait shortages,” said Glenn Cooke, chief executive officer of Cooke Inc., which includes Cooke Aquaculture.

Most of the U.S. lobster catch comes to the shore in Maine, where lobstermen landed nearly 120 million pounds (54 million kilograms) of the valuable seafood last year. Fishermen rely heavily on herring as a bait source, though they also use other species, such as menhaden.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

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