Saving Seafood

Ex-manager says processor repacked expired seafood

July 19, 2018 — Gloucester Seafood Processing, the largely shuttered local subsidiary of Illinois-based Mazzetta Co., is a defendant in a lawsuit accusing the seafood giant of artificially manipulating lobster prices and repackaging expired seafood into new packaging with new expiration dates.

The accusations are contained in a wrongful termination suit brought by Corey Thompson, a former general manager at Mazzetta’s Atwood Lobster subsidiary in South Thomaston, Maine. Besides Gloucester Seafood Processing, the action also names Mazzetta Co. and its parent company, JorZac Inc., as well as Atwood, Londonderry Freezer LLC., and other Mazzetta subsidiaries as defendants.

Thompson claims in the lawsuit that he was fired with no explanation on May 26, 2017 — five days after he sent an email to Mazzetta Co. owner Tom Mazzetta and another company executive “expressing his concern that artificially deflated raw material prices” to benefit other Mazzetta subsidiaries “was illegal and in violation of domestic and international tax laws.”

In the same email, attached to the lawsuit as an exhibit, Thompson “expressed his concern that repacking expired seafood with new expiration dates was morally wrong and illegal.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Word of Gloucester Seafood Processing reopening catches city leaders by surprise

April 3, 2018 — The comments last week by the founder of the Mazzetta Company that the seafood processor will resume processing fresh fish at its largely dormant Gloucester Seafood Processing plant caught many by surprise — including city officials.

Tom Mazzetta, the chief executive officer of the Illinois-based seafood conglomerate that bears his family’s name, told a respected fishing website that the Gloucester Seafood Processing plant in the Blackburn Industrial Park will resume operations before the year is out.

“We’ll be processing the finest fish in New England before the end of the year,” Mazzetta was quoted as saying in the Undercurrentnews.com piece.

On Monday morning, Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken said the city has not heard a peep from anyone at the Mazzetta Company about re-firing daily operations at Gloucester Seafood Processing which the company unexpectedly — and without explanation — shuttered in December 2016, a little more than a year after it first opened.

“We haven’t heard a word, not from anyone in Illinois or from anyone associated with the plant here,” Romeo Theken said during an event Monday with NOAA Regional Administrator Mike Pentony at the city’s alewife fishway in West Gloucester.

According to the online story posted late last week, Mazzetta declined to expand on the company’s plans beyond his simple statement.

He wouldn’t say if Gloucester Seafood Processing also would be processing lobsters, as it did when it first opened in 2015, or what the size and composition of the new work force will be following the re-opening.

He didn’t reveal whether the property at 21-29 Great Republic Drive, which was listed online for sale last December (with an asking price of $17 million) will be coming off the market. He also refused to shed any light on why Gloucester Seafood Processing was closed in the first place.

Mazzetta did not respond Monday to phone calls from the Gloucester Daily Times seeking clarification and amplification on his comments to the website.

Mazzetta, with the assistance of city and state tax sweeteners, bought the former Good Harbor Fillet property in the industrial park for about $5 million in 2014 from High Liner Foods.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

MASSACHUSETTS: Seafood supplier tries to make inroads with local eateries for Gloucester-landed fish

June 7, 2017 — Frank Ragusa is making a point, leaning forward in his chair and punctuating each sentence by banging his hand on the conference table, producing thumps so loud they later sound like explosions on the recording of the conversation.

In between bursts of percussion, the chief executive officer and partner in Gloucester’s Finest Seafood makes the same impassioned point he has been making since he returned to Cape Ann two years ago from Seattle as the director of fresh seafood at Gloucester Seafood Processing.

The point is this: The Gloucester story still plays in the farthest reaches of the nation. The saga of America’s oldest commercial fishing port, of slicker-clad, fishermen wrestling fresh marine life out of the cold waters of the Atlantic, still strikes a chord.

Out there.

“Most of our biggest customers right now are outside New England,” Ragusa said while sitting in the conference room of the seafood processing company he founded last year as a tenant within the confines of the Cape Ann Seafood Exchange on Harbor Loop.

Rising from the ashes of GSP’s surreal closure last year by the Mazzetta Company, Gloucester’s Finest Seafood is at the heart of Ragusa’s crusade to help breathe new life into America’s oldest fishing community by promoting its bounty of freshly harvested seafood.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

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

Expanding lobster supplier hires New England seafood veteran

June 14, 2016 — York, Maine-based live lobster wholesaler Maine Coast has hired a general manager for its new Boston Fish Pier facility, which will open later this month.

Peter Kendall, a New England seafood sector veteran who’s previous role was operations manager at Mazzetta’s Gloucester Seafood Processing factory, is joining Maine Coast.

“We are happy to welcome Peter Kendall to our growing team,” said Tom Adams, founder and owner of Maine Coast, in a release. “This is a critical position as we expand our live lobster wholesale business to Boston. I needed someone with a strong understanding of the seafood business and real leadership skills. We found both with Peter.”

Kendall started in the seafood industry when he was 15 working summers as a lumper at the Portsmouth fisheries co-op. He studied resource economics at the University of New Hampshire and continued working seasonally at the co-op.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

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

MASSACHUSETTS: Federal Grant To Boost Gloucester Seafood Processing

October 14, 2015 — GLOUCESTER, Mass. — A $550,500 matching grant from the federal government will help the city carry out a $1.11 million water and sewer project aimed at boosting the water capacity for a growing number of high-volume commercial users in the city’s Blackburn Industrial Park.

The grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, announced Tuesday by U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton at a gathering of city and area business leaders at the Gloucester Seafood Processing Inc. plant, the former Good Harbor Fillet facility, will allow companies like Gloucester Seafood, nearby Intershell and others within the park to grow, Moulton said.

It will also open the door to an estimated 150 new jobs within Gloucester’s “seafood processing innovation cluster,” Moulton’s announcement indicated.

Dave Anderson, manager for Gloucester Seafood Processing LLC — a division of the Illinois-based Mazzetta Corp., said his facility already has 180 full-time employees processing 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of lobster and up to 15,000 pounds of other home-caught seafood a day in a renovated plant that began production over the summer.

“This project is a project that means a lot for the city of Gloucester,” interim Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken told the gathering of more than two dozen in a Gloucester Seafood conference room. “This is not just about Gloucester Seafood, it’s about all of the business along this road (Great Republic Drive). It’s about economic development, jobs — it’s about ensuring that this industrial park brings in jobs to our city.”

Read the full story from the Gloucester Daily Times