A company in Down East Maine that made salt from the ocean has closed down after its owner died in April.
The company’s website is still live, however, and some online customers are wondering why they haven’t received their orders.
Maine Sea Salt was founded and run by Stephen Cook, who grew up and started the business on Bailey Island in Harpswell, where his parents founded and operated Cook’s Lobster House.
Cook, who moved the sea salt company to Marshfield in Washington County in 2006, died on April 29 at the age of 73 “after a long battle with diabetes and heart disease,” according to his obituary.
Town officials in Marshfield said the company has ceased operations, even though its website is still functional and is capable of accepting online orders and payments. Attempts to contact Cook’s surviving family members have been unsuccessful.
“They are permanently closed,” Marshfield’s town clerk, Charlesy Davis, said Tuesday. “I’ve had a few inquiries from people who placed orders.”
A phone number listed on the company’s website is no longer working, according to an automated message that plays when it’s called. Other contact information for the company found online, including another phone number and email addresses, were not working this week.
The website appears capable of still accepting online orders, however, allowing customers to click on items they want to buy and then proceed to checkout.
One customer contacted the Bangor Daily News to say he had placed an order on July 14 and has since checked several times to see if his order had shipped.
With an order number and email the man provided, the Bangor Daily News confirmed on the company’s web site that his order was still waiting to be processed as of Tuesday. He had purchased six small bottles of sea salt and six small bottles of a blend of salt and dulse seaweed.
“Emails are not being returned,” he said. “I have been charged $138.”
Richard Regan, an attorney in Topsham, said he is assisting Cook’s surviving family with trying to get legal authority from probate officials in Washington County to assume control over the business and website. The family petitioned the county’s Registry of Probate last month to get that authority but, until the county probate office grants permission to Cook’s relatives to access and make changes to the website, it will remain capable of accepting orders.
“He was the company,” Regan said of Cook. “Nobody has the authority to do anything.”
The company also had a setback last winter, before Cook passed away, when its facilities were battered in the Dec. 18 storm that caused flood and wind damage throughout much of the state.
“With gusting winds reaching 90 mph, the storm damaged 70 percent of our solar salt evaporation houses, peeling back the greenhouse covers,” Cook wrote on an online fundraising appeal. “Fortunately, the frames appear to be intact.”
Cook wrote that the company’s four employees, who worked seasonally, might have to find work elsewhere if the company could not rebuild.
“The funding is for replacing the greenhouse covers and the labor to get it done,” Cook wrote.
The funding appeal raised only $4,255 of its $37,000 goal.
In a 2015 story in the BDN, Cook said he and his wife started the company in 1998, after he saw packaged sea salt being sold at a health food store.
“I thought ‘we could make that,’” Cook told the reporter. “We have plenty of ocean. And we started looking into it.”
Cook said it was difficult figuring out how to evaporate large volumes of filtered seawater, but that he settled on a method of using the power of the sun and greenhouses, which he said helps to preserve the ocean flavor.
“People want to know where their food is coming from,” he said at the time. “My aim is to have a salt that’s not just gourmet. You don’t have to be a salt snob and buy a $20 jar of salt. I want to be somewhere in the middle, with the people who enjoy their food and cooking and care about where their products come from. That’s my market.”
