Maggie Terry says her first reaction when a friend suggested she and Dick Conroy call their new business Free Range Fish was “You’re kidding; I don’t know if I could do that.” But after they had all stopped laughing, she reconsidered. “I thought, ‘Why not?’ ” she says.
“There’s this thing about free range chicken,” Terry explains, “and after all, all commercially caught fish is free range.” Still, she admits the spoof has had unintended consequences – people stop by and ask, “Do you have free fish?”
Terry and Conroy first used the catchy name for a wholesale business operated out of her house in Portland and his in Philadelphia. They expanded it to Free Range Fish and Lobster when they bought Tiny’s Bigman Seafood at 450 Commercial Street and opened a retail shop in January. Terry was trained for the hotel food and beverage business and worked at different locations of the Radisson Hotel Corporation for 10 years before moving to Maine in 1987. At first she continued in the hotel business here, but then began to work for Seatrade International, then located in Portland. “I started by running the production room,” she says, “and while I was there, one of the cutters taught me everything about fish – how to look at it; how to grade it, how to judge the amount it will yield when cut – and in return, I taught him management.”
In subsequent industry jobs in Portland, she began to buy fish at the Portland Fish Auction, which she continues to do for Free Range Fish and Lobster and also for a separate company she runs, Solar Seafood, where she acts as a quality control agent on the auction floor for other companies.
“When Tiny’s came up for sale,” she says, “I was thinking I’d like to have a retail market to do food out of.” She’s begun to fulfill this dream by opening a takeout kitchen at the market and offering fish sandwiches, fish and chips, fried clams and scallops, lobster and crab rolls and chowders. People embarking on the SCOTIA PRINCE, which is berthed next door, are frequent customers. In the near future, Terry plans to expand this end of the business, saying it is particularly satisfying to her because it combines her hotel food and beverage experience with her seafood expertise.
Although she stocks cod, pollock, hake, cusk, monkfish and other species, (including some farm-raised fish and shellfish), Terry says haddock, lobster and scallops are the market’s biggest sellers. “I try to have some odd species in the case every day,” she says, “like a tripletail or sea bass. Some go over; some are too pricey.” She also does a lot of special orders, and the market provides overnight shipping to U.S. destinations.
After eight months, Terry says the business is on target with its five-year plan. She and Conroy employ 10 full-time people and process their own fish. “The work is hard, but we have fun,” she says, “and we want our customers to have fun. We want them to enjoy seafood, to be comfortable with it. We want them to think of it as an exciting food.”
For further information, visit their website at www.freerangefish.com or call 774-8469.