GOULDSBORO – Sardine canning was once as much a part of Maine’s coastal fabric as lobster boats and Nor’easters with dozens of canneries employing thousands of workers who cut and packed the fish into small cans by hand.
But the closing of a sardine plant in Bath has left only one survivor from a once-thriving industry in the United States.
Here on the rocky shores of eastern Maine, the Stinson Seafood plant is hard to miss: Out front there’s an aluminum fisherman as tall as a telephone pole wearing yellow oilskins and proudly holding an oversized can of Beach Cliff sardines.
Inside the plant, where the smell of sardines lingers and workers still pack the fish by hand, there is a bittersweet feeling about being the last sardine cannery in the country.
“It’s unbelievable that there’s only one left,” said 73-year-old Lela Anderson, who has worked in sardine canneries since the 1940s, when she was in high school. “When you stop and think about it, you say, This can’t be true.”‘
Sardine canneries were immortalized by John Steinbeck when he wrote about the canneries, flophouses and honky-tonks of Monterey, Calif., in his 1945 novel “Cannery Row.”
But Cannery Row never had it on Maine, where the first U.S. sardine cannery opened in 1875 in Eastport. That first year, 60,000 cans of Eagle-brand sardines were produced.
Canneries sprouted in no fewer than 33 coastal communities from Eastport to South Portland, employing more than 6,000 workers. In 1900, the number of Maine canneries peaked at 75 and production five years later hit 344 millions cans – more than four cans for every American at the time.
Old black-and-white photos show cavernous factories with assembly lines of men, women and children sorting, snipping and packing sardines. In the earliest days, young boys and girls were among the cutters using sharp knives to decapitate the fish with one slice and remove their entrails with another for $2 to $3 a day.
Lela Anderson recalls coming in third place in the statewide sardine-packing contest in Rockland. So big was the industry that the annual value of packed sardines routinely exceeded Maine’s famous lobster until the late 1960s.
But economics and consumer tastes changed, machinery became automated and the industry began a slow decline. The number of plants dropped over the decades, dipping below 20 in 1972 and below 10 in 1988 until, finally, there was but one.
These days, sardines remain in kitchen cabinets and lunch pails of many Americans, but they aren’t popular among younger people.
Still, sardines are popular worldwide and canneries can be found in Scotland, Norway, Poland and other Baltic countries, Mexico, South America and Southeast Asia, said John Stiker, an executive vice president with Bumble Bee Seafoods in San Diego. Bumble Bee owns the Stinson plant in Gouldsboro, while its sister company in Canada owns another in Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, which is the last sardine cannery in Canada.
U.S. canneries for other fishery products have also fallen by the wayside over the years. Bumble Bee operates the last U.S. tuna cannery in California, the last shrimp cannery in New Orleans, and one of the last two clam canneries, he said.
“We’ve become pretty comfortable with canneries in the United States, which isn’t an easy thing to make work because labor costs are higher here than other parts of the world,” Stiker said. “But we’ve found a way to make them work.”
The 92,000-square-foot Stinson plant gets its fish from boats that bring in the catches from fishing boats that work off the Maine coast from June into October. The rest of the year, fish is trucked in.
Bumble Bee recently spent $11 million for renovation and equipment upgrades at the plant, which has a complex system of conveyor belts, flumes, plastic bins, cutting machines, steam boxes, canning equipment and other machines.
The fish are no longer cut by hand – a machine does that – but employees dressed in aprons, hairnets, gloves and boots still sort and pack the fish. They wear ear plugs to shield against the noisy machinery, and there’s a fishy smell in the air.
Last year, the plant processed 310,000 cases of sardines, or 3.1 million cans in traditional and flavored varieties like mustard, tomato or hot sauce, said Peter Colson, production manager. The goal this year is to process 450,000 to 475,000 cases.
The finished product is sold under a variety of labels, including the top brand Beach Cliff, along with Brunswick, Portside, Commander, Fisherman’s Net and Acadia. Cans of Beach Cliff proclaim: “Proudly made in the USA.”
According to National Marine Fisheries Service statistics, per capita sardine consumption in the United States now stands at 0.1 pounds. That’s down from 0.2 pounds through most of the 1990s and 0.3 pounds through most of the 80s.
But overall sardine sales are flat at roughly $70 to $75 million a year, penetrating 12.5 to 15.5 percent of U.S. households, according to Bumble Bee.
“Sales are still holding strong,” Colson said. “So somebody’s still eating them – 450,000 cases a year, that’s a lot of fish.”
Sardines are a hard sell on young people, with the average consumer trying them for the first time between 40 and 50 years old, Stiker said.
But they have market appeal because they are high in omega-3 fatty acids, which have been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease. Stiker said he is bullish on the future because America’s population is aging and is more health-conscious than ever.
“We look at the aging population as a real boon for canned seafood,” he said, “and for canned sardines in particular.”
—
On the Net:
Bumble Bee Seafoods: www.bumblebee.com
AP-ES-04-30-05 1515EDT
Comments are no longer available on this story