Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: A meeting of the minds on the future of the fisheries

August 3, 2017 — For some, the focus was on collaboration and the need to build sustainable seafood partnerships.

“Much of what we have already learned comes from the farming sector,” said Jack Wiggin, head of the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Urban Harbors Institute. Opening a Wednesday morning conference on the seafood industry at The Gloucester House, he noted cited parallels between harvesting America’s farms and seas.

To Anamarija Frankic, however, the future of the seafood industry is tied to a more basic approach.

“It’s like the chicken and egg,” said Frankic, a UMass-Boston teacher of biomimicry — the science of seeking solutions based on time-tested patterns and models. “How can you have aquaculture? How can you sustain seafood without protecting the ocean (waters), not just in the harbors but in watersheds? Much of what we do is very specific, protecting and rebuilding specific species or specific habitat, but we have to work to sustain the entire coastal habitat.”

Those were just two of the ideas raised over the course of the daylong conference, which was funded by the state’s Seaport Economic Council and drew more than 50 experts representing government agencies, fishermen, seafood processors and community leaders.

“This is a summit — I would call it that,” Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken said in welcoming the group to Gloucester. “We haven’t truly had something like this in 20 years.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Chefs, city promote local catch

June 26, 2017 — The city is expanding its Gloucester Fresh seafood campaign with a membership program for local and regional restaurants that will supplement the direct pipeline of fresh, locally harvested species with ideas on how to prepare and promote them.

The Gloucester Fresh Restaurant Membership program will offer its members seasonal seafood promotions, as well as guidelines for seasonal seafood availability, a listing of under-utilized species for “creative and cost-effective recipes” and other benefits.

“By utilizing fresh and local seafood, you are not only providing delicious and healthy food to consumers, but also supporting your community,” said Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken. “We’re excited to launch this first-of-its-kind restaurant membership program to showcase our heritage while providing the freshest seafood products.”

The campaign already has attracted some of the most prominent restaurants in Gloucester, including The Gloucester House, the Azorean Restaurant and Bar, The Causeway Restaurant, Tonno Restaurant and Passports.

Organizers said most of the member restaurants already served seafood harvested locally and landed in Gloucester and they became members because they believe in the course the city has plotted to promote the area’s fresh seafood, its restaurants and its seafood processors and suppliers.

“Right now, the market favors places that use local ingredients and products,” said Lenny Linquata, owner of The Gloucester House. “The key is to provide people with a means for enjoying the local experience. And there is no better way to do that than by sampling local foods and local cuisine.”

Linquata said his restaurant buys its lobsters, fish and scallops directly off boats landing their catch in Gloucester, as well as purchasing its clams locally.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Video series with local chef showcases Gloucester fish

June 6, 2017 — The Gloucester Fresh campaign to market Cape Ann’s bounty of seafood has made its way to the little screen. Several of them, actually.

The campaign, which in the past has included digital billboards and other marketing tools, now has produced five seafood video demonstrations of recipes tailored to the local catch, as well as a tutorial from local fisherman Al Cottone on how to shop and buy the freshest seafood.

“By utilizing fresh and local seafood you are not only preparing delicious and healthy food, but also supporting your community,” Gloucester Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken said in a statement. “We’re excited to launch a new series of captivating cooking videos which will help inspire chefs of all kinds to utilize affordable, seasonal, local, and regional seafood.”

Got a hankering for pollock with mashed potatoes and parsnips? Got you covered. Pining for a new flounder recipe? There are two, as well as individual recipes for whiting pate and redfish with warm spring corn and a tomato salsa.

“These really are updated recipes, with a fresher and more modern approach to cooking,” said Heather Atwood, the esteemed local food writer who began working with the city and the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association on raising the regional and national profile of Cape Ann seafood.

The videos, shot in the kitchen of Atwood’s Rockport home, feature Annie Copps, a well-known presence on the Boston restaurant and food-writing scene. Copps has worked in the kitchens of restaurants such as Olives and Jasper’s, as well as serving as food editor at Boston Magazine and Yankee Magazine.

“I’ve known Annie for, gosh, I don’t know how long, just from being involved with food,” Atwood said. “She’s just fabulous and did a great job in these videos.”

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times 

MASSACHUSETTS: City hosts Scottish, Indonesian industry groups for day

March 22, 2017 — The third and final day of the international Seafood Expo North America was unfolding in Boston on Tuesday. But as far as the city of Gloucester was concerned, the real action was here.

For the second consecutive year, the city supplemented its presence at the massive seafood show by playing host to groups of foreign fishermen and seafood processors willing to trek to end of Route 128 to see Gloucester for themselves.

The groups, which featured fishermen and seafood executives from Scotland and Indonesia, were treated to lunch at Cruiseport Gloucester —baked stuffed haddock, sauteed green beans and Sicilian cookies from the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association — and tours of the Cape Ann Seafood Exchange on Harbor Loop and Intershell in the Blackburn Industrial Park.

It was yet another element in the city’s campaign to promote its Gloucester Fresh brand and its strategy of stockpiling international seafood contacts that just might blossom into tangible business assets in the future.

The two groups had met individually with Gloucester officials during the first two days of the seafood show at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and didn’t finalize the plans for their visit until Tuesday morning.

“We’re so pleased that you decided to come visit us,” said Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken. “There is so much that we share culturally as harvesters of seafood from the ocean.”

The visit came one day after the city hosted a reception and cooking demonstration at the seafood expo to further promote the Gloucester Fresh brand. The reception drew more than 75 show participants, as well as state and local officials.

Read the full story from The Gloucester Times here 

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: Chinese delegation to talk lobster, fish

April 22, 2016 — Gloucester will add more international visitors to its guest register when it welcomes a delegation of Chinese government officials and seafood executives, as well as Chinese-American business leaders, on Monday to talk about economic development opportunities.

The visit has been in the works since February, when Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken extended an invitation during a meeting with Chinese-American business leaders, many of them restaurateurs, and officials from Boston’s Chinatown Main Street association at an occasion celebrating the Chinese New Year.

The Chinese government delegation will feature some heavy hitters, including four officials from the the New York-based consulate general’s office of the People’s Republic of China. The visitors also will include three executives from The American Chinese Culinary Federation, a restaurant trade group that represents thousands of restaurants and seafood sellers nationwide, as well as officials of Chinatown Main Street and other businesses leaders from Boston’s Chinese-American community.

The mayor will host a meeting at City Hall with the visitors, who then will embark on a tour of the city’s waterfront and seafood infrastructure.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

From necessity, delicious seafood invention

April 5, 2016 — Because restaurants sell 70 percent of the seafood consumed in the United States, chefs are hugely influential in creating market trends, so Latitude 43’s chef Ryder Ritchie wants you to know there’s nothing fishy about dogfish. Or, for that matter, monkfish. Or pogies, or skate, or pollock, hake, tusk, or even, once you get the hang of them, those ubiquitous little invasive crustaceans, green crabs.

Notice, he doesn’t mention redfish, a species that — armed with their moveable feast of redfish soup — the formidable duo of Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken and Angela DeFillipo have done a dazzling job of marketing at Boston’s Seafood Expo and beyond.

But everything else that might ever have been referred to as “trash fish?”

Look for it on chef Richie’s future forward menus at Latitude 43.

This Wednesday evening — Latitude 43’s third annual sustainable seafood benefit for Maritime Gloucester — Ritchie recommends for starters, Saffron Monkfish Stew in wild mushrooms and basil; Atlantic Razor Clams with lemongrass, house-made chilies and charred bread; followed by an entree of brown-butter-seared local flounder with capers and golden raisins, grilled asparagus, olive-oil-poached fingerling potatoes, sherry foam and pine nuts.

Flounder? Underutilized?

Yes, says Ritchie. Maybe not as underutilized as other species Gloucester natives like himself grew up hearing “bad stuff about,” but certainly never up there with, say, the now highly regulated, venerable cod.

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Team Gloucester packs them in at international expo

March 7, 2016 — BOSTON — There was no shortage of foreign languages filtering around the cavernous exhibition hall at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center when the international Seafood Expo North America show opened Sunday.

Visitors walking the aisles criss-crossing the exhibition floor among the 1,240 exhibitors could hear, among other tongues, snippets of Japanese, English, Spanish, Norwegian, Hebrew, Vietnamese and Korean.

And Gloucester. They most definitely could hear Gloucester, whether they wanted to or not.

Operating with a basic strategy of go-big or go-home, Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken and her merry band of Gloucesterites certainly made their presence known at one of the largest seafood shows in the world.

“Come to the city of Gloucester booth at 1671 and try some of our red fish soup, made with local Gloucester fish,” Romeo Theken announced over and over, and with authority, into the microphone as thousands of visitors and exhibitors milled past. “Gloucester fish is fresh fish. Check it out at www.gloucesterfresh.com.”

Not satisfied with just belting out a looping commentary and commercials for her city, Romeo Theken began walking through the crowd holding a redfish fillet in her hand, beseeching the assembled to smell it.

Read the full story at Gloucester Daily Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Gloucester must relentlessly promote locally harvested seafood

February 20, 2016 — Gloucester needs to be relentless in promoting the benefits of its locally harvested seafood, as well as the fishermen and processors that send it to market, a city official told the Fisheries Commission this week.

Economic Development Director Sal Di Stefano said the city is addressing the challenges of operating in the modern, international seafood market with a marketing strategy designed to promote the city, its fresh seafood bounty, its fishermen and its shore-side businesses to the seafood-consuming world.

“If we don’t do this, other people will,” Di Stefano told the commission Thursday night during a discussion on the city’s plans for the upcoming Seafood Expo North America show in Boston. “And they will try to take it from us.”

The city’s new branding campaign, “Gloucester Fresh,” is at the heart of the promotional strategy aimed at helping consumers identify seafood harvested from the waters around Cape Ann and landed in Gloucester while appreciating its nutritional and sustainable benefits.

Working with Salem-based Sperling Interactive, the city is developing a website that Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken is scheduled to launch at the beginning of the Seafood Expo during the first week of March.

Read the full story at Gloucester Daily Times

Gloucester, Mass. investment in seafood expo is money well spent

February 3, 2016 — Of all the initiatives begun last year by then-interim Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken, the return of the city to the international Seafood Expo North America in Boston was a no-brainer, given Theken’s deep ties to the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association.

By all accounts, the endeavor was a success. The city’s booth stood out amid a sea of sterile, cardboard convention center displays, thanks to the presence of the mayor and Angela Sanfilippo, president of the Fishermen’s Wives, and a bubbling, aromatic pot of redfish soup. That end product — the food people actually put in their mouths — is as emblematic of the Gloucester fishing industry as its hard-working fleet or the Man at the Wheel. Gloucester fishes so people can eat. What better way to bring home the point than with 40 steaming gallons of fish stew?

The end result was an increased awareness of the Gloucester brand, and a series of meetings among city officials, waterfront businesses and potential clients from the United States and abroad. It’s exactly the kind of result one would hope for from a long weekend’s attendance at a trade expo.

Last year’s expo, in fact, is still paying off: On the Monday of this year’s event, the city will play host to potential buyers and trade representatives from more than a dozen countries, including Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Iceland, Taiwan, Morocco, Spain, Indonesia and the Netherlands. Those are real contacts.

Read the full editorial at Gloucester Daily Times