July 1, 2017 — San Francisco chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski were among the attendees at an after-hours Maine lobster tasting party in Portland, where new-shell lobster was the only item on the menu. They and other far-flung chefs spent a day on a lobster boat, mingled with lobstermen, talked to local chefs experienced with different ways to prepare it and ate buckets of it, be it on toast, in a chowder or on a bun.

“I’ve always liked lobster, but I fell in love with the story” of how it’s caught and by whom, Krasinski said. “We’ve had it before as a special, but it’s definitely going on our menu.”

That’s exactly the response the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, a group organized four years ago to promote Maine lobster, wanted to hear. It validates the collaborative’s two-year campaign to familiarize chefs with new-shell lobsters – also called soft-shells or shedders because they have just molted – through a series of tasting parties and marketing events in foodie cities across the nation.

Building that kind of demand is good for Maine’s $533 million lobster fishery, said collaborative director Matt Jacobson, especially in the summer, when almost all of the 6,500 licensed lobstermen are fishing, and much of the coastline is rolling in product. The new-shell campaign focuses on building demand in nontraditional lobster markets when supply is at its highest.

But some Maine lobstermen, especially those who fish Down East, say the collaborative’s focus on selling new-shell lobster in the summer is not helping them. They don’t start catching a lot of new shells until fall, when restaurants that focus on seasonal fare trade in lobster for mussels or duck and the biggest buyers left are Canadian processors eager to finally have the new-shell lobster market to themselves.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald