Given the way today’s college graduates plan their jobs aiming years ahead toward an ultimate goal, you might think John Norton had done just that upon graduating from the University of Maine at Orono 33 years ago. He didn’t, but the path he took couldn’t have prepared him better for owning and operating Portland’s Cozy Harbor Seafood, Inc., which he and partner Joseph Donovan started in 1980. Today it’s one of Maine’s largest groundfish processors and Maine’s largest shrimp and lobster processor.
Norton started by marrying a fisherman’s daughter in 1973 and fishing lobster with his father-in-law off Long Island, in Casco Bay. The going rate for a sternman was ten cents per trap. Between 1973 and 1975, he earned $200 a week lobstering. In the winter he went gillnetting and hook fishing, and remembers averaging $42 a week the winter of 1976, which led him to come ashore and take an 80-hour-a week salaried job managing a restaurant.
Two years later, Norton responded to an ad from the Boothbay Fishermen’s Co-op. In addition to the regular managerial duties, the co-op had a restaurant and wanted to expand its market. “Being a co-op manager is one of the toughest jobs in the world,” he said. “Besides all the physical work, if there are 20 members of the co-op, you’ve got 20 bosses. If there are 40 members, you’ve got 40 bosses. Each feels he should give directions on how the co-op should be run.”
For whatever reason, the “managers” fired him. Still, he said, “it was a great experience. It was really interesting seeing the business from the other side.” A couple of days later, Norton started Cozy Harbor Seafood with a telephone and a VW bus. “I’d buy lobster and fish from dealers and sell it to wholesalers around the country”, he said. Each morning, he’d find what was available and the price, then call and sell. After making his day’s sales, he’d go back where he’d bought what he’d sold, load it, and take it to the airport or truck and ship it out. “I got out of work at a regular time every day,” he said. “I had time to play cribbage. No employees.”
He moved to an office in the Atlantic Seafood of Maine building, which had an unloading operation, did processing, and had a retail store in 1978. In 1979, they asked Norton to manage sales. He did because, he said, “the days of the independent broker were fast coming to an end.”
Nine months later, Atlantic Seafood closed the processing, retail and wholesale parts of the business but kept the fish unloading and selling. Previously, Norton had brought in Joseph Donovan to manage the processing, so in early 1980, he and Donovan bought the processing equipment, leased the facility and opened Cozy Harbor Incorporated.
When they started, 80 to 90 percent of their business was processing and selling fresh fish, and 10 to 20 percent was selling live lobster wholesale and to supermarkets nationwide.
“Those were pretty exciting days in the groundfish industry,” Norton recalled recently at his office on St. John Street. “There was a feeling of boundless opportunity. There was plenty of fish; prices were reasonable; it was a good time, a great business.”
By 1986, Maine shrimp had rebounded due to cutbacks and short seasons, so he and Donovan started processing shrimp. By 1990, because they were processing shrimp and groundfish, they opened a second plant for shrimp on Union Wharf and used the plant in South Portland to process groundfish. Back in 1983, Norton and two partners had opened an independent lobster buying station on Long Island in Casco Bay, independent of Cozy Harbor, Inc., called Casco Bay Lobster. But because there were more lobster than the market could handle by 1989 and 1990, he said the lobster market had become “incredibly difficult,” and by 1991-92 “there was a tremendous glut of lobster.” Fishermen went on strike when the boat price dropped to $1.50/lb. “There were thousands of crates of lobster, and nowhere for them to go,” he said; it was worse than the situation in Canada a couple of years ago.
In 1993 “the resource spiked, but the live market could not expand to absorb all the product.” Norton and Donovan had a shrimp plant idle from June through November, plus equipment and workers, so they started processing North American lobster. Since then, Cozy Harbor, Inc., has added three buying stations and bought out the other Casco Bay Lobster partners. It sells frozen cooked and peeled shrimp, whole cooked shrimp, lobster meat, lobster tails, and whole frozen lobster. It processes fresh fish, and has just started selling live lobster.
Kristin Millar, Maine Lobster Promotion Council Executive Director, called board member Norton, “A tremendous asset to our organization,” and said, “I’ve learned a lot from him.” Norton is also a director of the Portland Fish Exchange. Gregory Hansen, who had been away for 17 years, recently returned to the Cozy Harbor family and said, “It’s amazing how many familiar faces are still here.” Asked to describe Norton, Hansen said, “He’s serious. He has high demands and expectations of himself. For all his tremendous managers, he continues to be a fairly hands-on kind of guy.”
Norton’s shrimp processing plant looks like a miniature United Nations. Line workers, cooks, and quality inspectors come in all colors. Somalis with covered heads under hairnets, Latinos, and Yankees wear insulated lab coats and white booties in the high-risk area and blue booties in the low risk area. They produce, Norton said, “1.8 million perfectly peeled, perfectly cooked, individually frozen and glazed shrimp per day. The hard part is making sure each shrimp is cooked to the proper temperature, that each has all the shell removed without damage to the shrimp, and that each one is completely frozen and not stuck together.”
Maintaining food safety and preventing cross-contamination is hard, too. Everyone must don safety gear and wash hands before entering processing areas. When going from high risk to low risk or opposite areas, they must re-wash and don new booties. They go through pair after pair after pair, but it’s what the marketplace requires.
Norton says that marketplace is consolidating and “there are fewer and fewer companies making the decisions on what they’re going to offer to consumers.” He mentioned Wal-Mart and Red Lobster, and said, “Where there used to be a lot of Mom and Pop supermarkets, there are now chains.” He said, “Maine seafood processors are part of an extremely competitive global seafood market. All processors are competing for a share of that market and, ultimately, so are all fishermen who sell their products in the world marketplace — There are virtually no small-protected markets left. In the business nowadays, if you don’t grow and expand, you die.”