There’s a thread of altruism that runs through the management of Stonington Sea Products (SSP). Not that they don’t have profit in mind, of course, but the do-gooder attitude is there and has been ever since the three-year-old business was just an idea. The plan, according to Richard Howe, president of the corporation and one of its primary investors, was to create a year-round business in Stonington that would be viable and take advantage of Stonington’s traditional fishing business, its history of processing seafood in canneries, and Maine’s internationally recognized seafood quality to create year-round employment. The original investors weren’t looking for the quick buck; rather, they wanted to take their time and build a solid business around absolutely top quality seafood.
When they began talking about what they wanted to do, they didn’t have a smoke house in mind. They planned to do a lot of processing and freezing of seafood. “What actually happened,” Howe said, “was different from our business plan. We always knew we wanted to be a value-added, quality producer of seafood products. We did not want to sell commodity products, where the company that has the most capital is the key; we wanted ours to be at the top end of the product line. That was our goal and that’s our continuing goal, something we keep in mind all the time. That’s the market we’re after: people who are not particularly price-sensitive and who are extremely quality-sensitive.”
General Manager and reigning fish master Richard Penfold, a former member of VSO, the British equivalent of the Peace Corps, volunteer, trout farmer, mackerel and herring processor, and fisheries teacher, is as altruistic as the investors. While at the North Atlantic Fisheries College on the Shetland Islands, off Scotland, he noticed the traditional smoking techniques were being lost. He’s found the same thing in Maine. The Suffolk-born Penfold worked on Shetland with men who’d run the kilns back in the 1950s, and he captured much of their knowledge. Over four years he assembled a seafood processing library for the college by collecting out-of-print books from all over Europe, some hundreds of years old, of techniques and recipes for smoking, marinating, salting, curing and cooking seafood. Now that smoked foods have invaded the gourmet marketplace, he thinks the process of smoking of seafood has developed more respect and he’d like to interest and involve Deer Isle students and schools in this aspect of food science. “I’d love to re-build that library here,” he said, “for the youth of this island as a resource.”
Take that point of view and combine it with the most rigorous standards for product quality, food handling and processing, and the resulting products couldn’t be less than successful. The attitude governing quality at Stonington Sea Products seems, in a way, to echo the old Shaker admonition: “Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.”
Penfold buys whole, premium-grade salmon, harvested twice a week for optimum freshness, from a supplier who grows the fish in the Bay of Fundy, with its 23-foot tides, at the lowest stocking densities in the industry. These conditions make for a healthy, firm-muscled product. He buys the rest of his fish from specialists in Portland and Boston.
After choosing the best of the best, Penfold hand-cuts each fish the day it is dry-cured with salt, alone – no sugar or other additives. Six to eight hours later the cured fish goes into a special Scottish kiln, an Innis Walker, the only one of its kind in this country – perhaps because, as Howe noted, “It’s a temperamental beast,” fired by mild hickory and cherry woods to produce a light, smoky flavor. Fourteen to sixteen hours later the fish emerges from the smoker, its natural oil having been given time to rise and mix with the light smoke. Thus enhanced, the fish is ready to be packaged and vacuum-packed in various sizes and combinations. (Fish slicer Tammy Hagarthy now uses a Danish “silk cut” slicing machine, recognized as the best in the world, to give perfect, uniform slices. She used to slice the fish by hand.)
To the uneducated American eye, the plant, designed and built from the ground up for efficiency, appears to be state-of-the-art. But Penfold is quick to say that though it’s good for today’s Maine, it’s nothing compared to current Icelandic and Norwegian models. “Most Maine businesses are working in old buildings they’re trying to bring up to regulations,” he explained. “We had the privilege of being able to build this [facility] from the ground up. “This plant is very special,” he continued. “In one aspect, it is state-of-the-art: in water and energy efficiency.” Everything done here has been planned with using as little water as possible. In fact, the system uses only about 550 gallons a day, versus the hundreds of thousands of gallons a day used by some plants. He also noted it’s the first fish plant, perhaps in the world, to be heated throughout by radiant, in-floor heat.
The results of all this planning and care have produced products that have garnered rave reviews.
David Rosengarten, of The Rosengarten Report, in 2001, just a year after the business started, wrote under the headline, A spectacular smoked salmon company that you must get to know: “This is a new company on the rocky coast of Maine that is bringing products of transcendent quality to the market. … Their hickory-smoked salmon is perhaps the finest Scottish-style smoked salmon I’ve ever tasted that wasn’t raised or smoked in Scotland. … I was also privileged to taste a few other products in the new Stonington line, and was similarly dazzled.”
R. W. Apple, Jr, in The New York Times a year later, wrote that Penfold “produces a superbly balanced smoked salmon in the Scottish style, neither as bland as the Norwegian product favored by the French nor as pungent as the typical Nova Scotia side, and a rich, glossy haddock, known to the Scots as finnan haddie.” (Howe, who might be just a tad biased, added, “This is the best finnan haddie outside of Scotland, maybe even the best in the world.”)
This past February, Food & Wine wrote up Penfold, and called Stonington’s products an “outstanding line of smoked foods.” It continued, “Our current favorites? Finnan Haddie (haddock), Bay of Fundy salmon and rope-cultured Blue Hill Bay mussels, which Penfold flavors with a delicious tomato-based salsa or a honey-Dijon mustard sauce.”
Those salsa-drenched smoked mussels were chosen as a finalist, by the National Association of the Specialty Food Trade in its 2002 Annual Product Awards Competition category, Outstanding Best Seller. Penfold’s Smoked Atlantic Salmon made finalist in Outstanding Meat, Paté, or Seafood.
“After Johnny Apple visited us last summer and wrote an article in the Times,” Howe said, “The New York Times dining room started serving our smoked salmon. They order a couple of sides a week.” Apple’s glowing article, it goes without saying, gave the business a big boost.
Such well-deserved success seems to prove the point that while doing the right thing the right way is never easy, it pays off in many ways, not the least of which is the satisfaction of knowing all the effort taken was worth it.
“We really are establishing ourselves in the top niche in the marketplace,” Penfold said. “It’s what we really sought to do.”