Just 20 people still work at Maine’s oldest seafood cannery, which recently announced that it will be closing next month.
Mike Sansing, general manager for Bar Harbor Foods in Whiting, said the cannery’s last day of operations will be Dec. 14, but not all of its workers will be affected by the decision to move production out of state.
Sea Watch International, which bought Bar Harbor Foods in 2016, owns a more efficient processing plant in Milford, Delaware, that will produce Bar Harbor Foods products, but it will continue to maintain offices in Whiting, he said.
The pending closure of the cannery on the shore of Machias Bay, where the company has produced clam juice, tins of fish and other seafood products for more than 100 years, may be the epitaph to Maine’s traditional seafood industry.
Instead of canning sardines, clams, mussels and other locally caught seafood in dozens of harbors spread along the coast, the sector has shifted to lobster — Maine’s largest and most valuable fishery — and farmed salmon. With the exception of the True North farmed salmon plant roughly a dozen miles away in Machiasport, Maine has fewer seafood processing facilities that tend to be newer and located in southern Maine or the midcoast.
Sansing said the decision to move Bar Harbor Foods’ production out of state was “painful” and thanked the cannery’s employees for their hard work.
“This decision is part of an overall restructuring of our business, which is necessary to address changing market conditions and ensure the long-term success of our company and positioning our company for future growth,” Sansing said.
Bar Harbor Foods has no plans to sell the property, Sansing said. Those employees who are laid off will receive severance packages when production at the site comes to an end.
He declined to comment further.
In recent years, with other Bar Harbor Foods products already having been outsourced out of state, the Whiting cannery has only produced canned soup, chopped clams, and clam juice. Its tins of fish — including sardines, kippers, and mackerel and salmon filets — in recent years had been produced in Canada but now are marked as products of Latvia, according to labels on those products.
A spokesperson for the Maine Department of Labor said the state is offering to help those losing their jobs by connecting them with re-employment or job re-training assistance.
For more than 100 years, since the state’s first sardine cannery opened in Eastport in 1875, hundreds of canneries operated along Maine’s coast, employing thousands of workers. But the fishery began to decline in the decades after World War II, and by the 1980s the vast majority had closed.
The last sardine cannery in Maine, which at the time was owned by Bumble Bee Foods, closed in the Gouldsboro village of Prospect Harbor in 2010. At the time Bumble Bee officials said they were closing the cannery because sharp reductions in federal catch limits for herring, which are called sardines after being canned, made the plant unprofitable.
Despite the decline in canning, Maine continues to be a major supplier in the U.S. of live and raw seafood, with more than $600 million of it brought ashore in 2023.
Of that value, more than 75 percent comes directly from lobster, which over the past decade has produced record-breaking revenues even as catch volumes have dipped slightly. In recent decades, several Maine companies have begun lobster processing as a way to boost the fishery’s economic impact, instead of shipping the catch out of state for processing somewhere else, but those efforts have had mixed success.
Seafood consumption in the U.S. generally has increased significantly over the past several decades, though it did dip from 2021 to 2022. Consumption of sardines specifically, which used to make up the vast majority of Maine’s seafood canning industry, has declined in recent decades, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service — though it has enjoyed a recovery in the past couple of years.
Maine’s aquaculture sector has grown to meet this demand. Canadian firm Cooke Aquaculture, which owns True North, operates dozens of salmon pen sites in the waters off Hancock and Washington counties, and in the past few years several land-based fish farms have been proposed in eastern Maine. Most of those proposals have run into difficulty with permitting and financing, however, and so far none has come to fruition.
