Digging for new seafood markets

SOMETHING'S FISHY: Members of the Atlantic Capes Fisheries team, from left: Vice President of Sales and Marketing Steve Zevitas, John Bloand, Suzanne O'Connell and Vice President and General Manager Thomas Slaughter III. The company has a fleet of eight dredging boats. / PBN FILE PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
SOMETHING'S FISHY: Members of the Atlantic Capes Fisheries team, from left: Vice President of Sales and Marketing Steve Zevitas, John Bloand, Suzanne O'Connell and Vice President and General Manager Thomas Slaughter III. The company has a fleet of eight dredging boats. / PBN FILE PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Most people think of clams as bite-sized creatures, with larger versions sometimes known as quahogs, especially in Rhode Island, but surf clams are something else again.
“They’re about the size of a small football,” said Thomas Slaughter, vice president and general manager of Atlantic Capes Fisheries Inc. in Bristol.
He explained that surf clams are 6 to 9 inches in length and weigh from 1 to 2 pounds. They cannot be gathered along the shore by hand like little clams, but live 60- to 125-feet deep in the ocean and are harvested by boat. Common foods that contain surf clams include chowder and fried-clam strips, Slaughter said.
While not a new product, Atlantic Capes found a new way to market surf clams and, in the process, the company expanded its line of products as well as its distribution territory to the Orient, said Slaughter and Steve Zevitas, vice president of sales and marketing.
Atlantic Capes Fisheries created a product known as “IQF (individually quick-frozen) Atlantic Surf Clam – Sushi Style,” distributed by one of several affiliates, Happy Clam.
The sushi surf clams are harvested in waters off the coast of Massachusetts where the sea bottom is soft, so less pressure is needed to dislodge the bivalve mollusks, thereby reducing sand embedded in each clam, according to Zevitas and Slaughter. Atlantic Capes has a fleet of eight dredging boats, kept off the coasts of Massachusetts and New Jersey.
A sustainable resource, Atlantic surf clams were one of the first species to have a fisheries-management plan as directed by the Magnuson-Stevens Act in 1976, according to Atlantic Capes. The management plan is meant to ensure longevity of the supply for generations to come.
Atlantic Capes sells the Happy Clam sushi brand in the United States, Hong Kong and China, but not Rhode Island yet (plans are in the works to do so, the two men said). The company entered the sushi market about six months ago due to requests from customers, particularly in China. “We’d like to expand all over the world,” Zevitas said. “It’s in the works, but it takes a long time.”
It also will take time to know if the new product was a good move in the long term. “We certainly hope so,” Zevitas said, when asked how lucrative the sushi market is, “but we don’t know yet. It takes a while to develop new products. You have to give it at least three years.”
The Great Recession is a key factor that led Atlantic Capes to sushi.
Business dipped for about a year to 18 months, Zevitas said, as fewer people went out to dinner, but began to bounce back in the last year. To overcome the slump, the company developed the sushi product and, Zevitas said, fine-tuned customer service. “We have a better delivery schedule than other [seafood processors],” he added, noting that same-day delivery of fresh produce is a regular service.
Slaughter made a point of giving credit to company employees for the firm’s success.
Employees are not temporary, as they are in some other seafood plants, but permanent workers. “A lot” are local, Slaughter said, and some have been with Atlantic Capes for as long as 30 years. “We have a very good work force,” he said, “and a good work environment. … [Cohen] believes in quality of life and in the quality of the work environment, and that is unusual today.”
Although the company specializes in surf clams, most of its business – about 90 percent, Zevitas said – involves the processing and delivery of fresh seafood, particularly scallops. The company’s frozen products are sold across the country, but fresh goods go to restaurants, retail outlets and soup makers only in New England and the mid-Atlantic, Zevitas said.
The Atlantic Capes website (www.atlanticcapes.com) says the company harvests, processes and markets more than 10 million pounds of scallops each year, making it one the largest “vertically integrated producers of sea scallops on the East Coast.”
The company also deals in squid, mackerel and oysters. Retail goods include clam sauce (both red and white), stuffed clams and chopped, sliced and minced clams, sold under such brands as Ipswitch, Galilean Seafoods, Ocean State and Hy Seas, as well as Happy Clam.
Besides the Bristol plant, the company has corporate headquarters in Cape May, N.Y., a production facility in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., and a sales office in New Bedford. •

COMPANY PROFILE
Atlantic Capes Fisheries Inc.
OWNER: Daniel Cohen
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Seafood harvesting, processing and marketing
LOCATION: 16 Broad Common Road,
Bristol
YEAR FOUNDED: 1978
EMPLOYEES: 120
ANNUAL SALES: WND

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