This Company Wants To Deliver N.B. Lobster Directly To People’s Doorsteps
ST. GEORGE, N.B – A company out of St. George is on a mission to bring New Brunswick lobsters right to people’s doors in Western Canada and beyond.
Ocean’s Door is a company that ships New Brunswick lobster and directly to the consumer. The company cuts out the many “middle-men” and amount of time the food is handled until it gets to your plate.
The company was founded by Murray Tucker and Justin Harris, who met years ago in high school.
“In 2008 we started working together on a lobster boat with one of our friends,” says Harris. “We came up with the idea of maybe shipping lobsters then, but we were quite young at the time.”
Harris stayed in fishery industry, while Tucker went off into the business world. However, when they met up again, they discovered that the business idea they came up with years back could become a reality.
“[Tucker] saw that there was a big surge in the China markets and everyone buying New Brunswick lobsters and getting shipped around quite a bit,” says Harris. “He came to me again with the idea and asked, ‘should we start this internet site up and start shipping our local lobsters around?'”
What makes Ocean’s Door different is that instead of selling lobster through wholesale to bigger companies, they are shipping smaller orders, directly to the consumer. The less time the lobsters are handled, the better the quality.
“We’re pretty much like a retail business. We go directly to our customers. Let’s say for example you lived in Toronto,” says Tucker. “If you were going to have lobster, it would get shipped to and bought by another business, then sold to another business. It’s transported a bunch of different times before it actually hits the customer’s plate. We actually just want to go directly to the customer.”
Once the lobster is brought in from their local fishing partners, it is brought into a facility with saltwater tanks. The lobster sits for 48 hours so that their systems are cleared. When an order is placed, Harris does a protein check to ensure the lobster is healthy enough to ship. Once checked, the lobster is then sent off through priority shipping in special packaging to the customer.
“We want high-quality,” says Tucker. “When the lobsters come in, we’re getting the best ones.”
“Because we’re business-to-customer, we want a specific type of seafood to send to them. We’re not interested in everything. We’re granular on what we want to sell.”
Ocean’s Door hopes to send lobster to both people’s homes and restaurants who want fresh, New Brunswick seafood. The first phase is to ship throughout Canada, then phase two, they have plans to go international, particularly in the Chinese market, where New Brunswick seafood is a hot commodity. The plan is to eventually ship other seafood, like scallops, as well.
“It’s for foodies in places like Toronto and Vancouver who don’t have access to the thing we have access to here on a daily basis,” says Tucker. “We’re going to be doing ‘dinner for twos’, ‘dinner for four’ [boxes]. Then hopefully some larger events, like weddings.”
Often, shipping New Brunswick seafood is a business-to-business model. Tucker and Harris say that sometimes, New Brunswick lobsters make stops in bigger ports like Boston on their way to their final destination. That means different products are getting mixed up and being mislabelled. What’s labelled as a Maine or Boston lobster could actually be from New Brunswick and vice versa.
But Ocean’s Door avoids that with their business model. Now with the business in full operation, Tucker and Harris hope the company can help share the stories of where New Brunswick seafood comes from, and help put the region’s seafood more on the map.
“We would like to be a household name in Toronto and Vancouver and internationally,” says Tucker.
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