Portrait by Benjamin Magro

Most people who catch, buy, process, or serve lobster are bracing for what’s expected to be another challenging season. There’s a global recession on, and consumers seem to be cutting back on everything from new cars to four-dollar lattes and, yes, pricey seafood entrées. Last fall saw the worst lobster prices in a decade, and the lobster industry is bracing for more tough times.

Linda Bean, by contrast, is buying lobsters like crazy.

Ms. Bean, the sixty-eight-year old granddaughter of L.L. Bean founder Leon Leonwood Bean, strolls along the top of the newly restored wooden dam of her Port Clyde lobster pound and points out the shallow cove where, come fall, she’ll begin hoarding tens of thousands of lobsters for the winter market. That morning, lobstermen were unloading their catch at her dock even as her drivers brought in truckloads from other wharves in Tenant’s Harbor and Vinalhaven. Her lobsters are now in the tanks of a wooden building overlooking the pound, awaiting their onward connections. Those bound for Bean’s live lobster customers bear a tag declaring their harbor of origin and the logo of her company.

“There’s a taste — a sweetness and texture quality — about the midcoast lobster that’s noticeable,” she says. “I want my fishermen to be able to go to Las Vegas on vacation and be able to see lobsters tagged from their community and to take pride in the quality and where they’re from.”

“There’s an opportunity here to make ourselves stronger,” she says of the world economic upheaval. “I hope we’re doing something about it.”

She sure seems to be. By the time you read this, Bean will have opened her Rockland lobster processing plant — the only such facility in midcoast Maine — which will churn out lobster stew, lobster salad, shrimp-and-lobster pie, and enough claw and knuckle meat to keep half the Northeast in generously stuffed lobster rolls. These products will be on offer in the display cases of two thousand supermarkets across the country under the Linda Bean’s Perfect Maine brand. This summer she’ll be selling them from her own chain of takeout kiosks and restaurants with locations in Portland, Freeport, Port Clyde, Camden, Searsport, and Delray Beach, Florida (home to a significant part of the native Maine diaspora).

Linda Bean is building Maine’s first vertically integrated lobster empire, a project that promises to keep much more of the supply chain right here in Maine. And she says she’s doing it to help shore up an industry and way of life that is essential to coastal Maine’s identity.

“This is more than an investment for my family and my children, it’s for the fishermen,” she says, seated at the lunch counter of the Port Clyde General Store, which she also owns. “They’re the endangered species, not the lobster. There’s plenty of lobster out there, but if they can’t make more than they are making now and have more stability in what their expectations can be every year, we’re not going to have them anymore.”

Until recently, Maine’s lobster industry had been enjoying a decade-long boom. While other fisheries were collapsing, lobstermen saw their combined annual catch jump from a respectable 21.7 million pounds in 1988 to more than 75 million pounds in 2006. Overall landings have dipped slightly since, but scientists see no sign that the lobster population is in danger.

But the lobster industry hasn’t been without its problems. The long real estate boom put pressure on commercial wharf and boatyard owners to sell to developers or wealthy retirees; of the state’s 5,300 miles of shorefront, only twenty miles remain as working waterfront, according to a 2007 survey by Rockland’s Island Institute. Volatile fuel and bait prices pinched lobstermen’s profits, just as they faced an expensive transition to new right whale-friendly gear.

Then there was Iceland.

When world credit markets shutdown last fall, Iceland’s banking sector collapsed, severing credit lines to their clients, which included many of the Canadian processors that buy the majority of Maine’s peak October catch. With consumer demand in freefall, prices paid to lobstermen fell to as low as $1.90 from $4.25 the year before. “We definitely took a hit in October,” says Patrice McCarron, the executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “You can’t fish if you’re not going to make any money, and there aren’t a lot of backup employment possibilities in Maine.”

For Bean, the events only confirmed what she had long suspected: that Maine’s dependence on Canadian processors was undermining local fishermen and dealers. “Canada has taken us by the throat,” she says whenever the issue comes up, pointing out that Maine has only three processors to consume the early fall glut of softshells, lobsters who’ve recently molted and are too weak to survive the live lobster trade.

“I’m very dismayed by the fact that we don’t have more processing in Maine — and that there’s no processing plant here in the most productive county in the state,” she says. “Canada’s been naming the price for a long time and a lot of dealers have lost a lot of money when they can’t get a good price.”

Her solution: build up local processing capacity, starting with Knox County, home to the state’s most productive lobster grounds. Her “buying stations” — the docks where lobstermen sell their catch — will send softshells not to Portland or Canada but to her Rockland plant, a converted scallop-processing facility. The shorter trip means more of the recently molted lobsters will survive, which is good for business, and the jobs and tax revenues stay in Maine. But if things go as planned, the greatest benefit will be a reliable source of demand to feed her growing retail stores and brands. (This year she expects her companies will handle three million pounds of lobster, one-twentieth of Maine’s catch.)

That’s where Bean’s heritage comes in handy. Successful merchandising seems to run in the family. Her grandfather started perhaps Maine’s most successful brand; her mother, Hazel Dyer, defined L.L. Bean’s ladies department in the 1960s and 1970s; her first cousin Leon Gorman transformed the family business into a global powerhouse. “If I have some of those genes, I’ll be so grateful,” she says with a laugh.

Lobster doesn’t have to just be a commodity, she reasons, and consumers will pay extra for a product they know to be high quality, wild-caught, and sustainably harvested. “I liken it to Frank Perdue coming on TV a few years ago,” she says. “We all used to think chicken was chicken, but he said ‘we only buy the best, plumpest chicken from the Delmarva Peninsula and that’s a Perdue chicken!’ It added value because it was branded, and that’s what I want to do.”

Dane Somers, executive director of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council, thinks Bean is onto something, particularly in affixing her live lobsters with their harbor of origin. “It’s an outstanding example of what you can do when you link a product to its source,” he says. “Lobsters are evocative of people’s vacations and memories of the Maine coast and they can become like that favorite wine you value because you once came across a little vineyard and liked its product and know who makes it and how it’s done. It becomes an experience.”

“It’s a direct branding of a Maine product — it’s fresh caught and you know where it’s caught,” says McCarron. “It’s great to see someone step forward and put that into a business plan.”

But if Bean is onto a good idea, it still leaves an intriguing question: Why would an independently wealthy woman in her late sixties without any experience in the seafood industry invest her time and capital in the notoriously fickle world of fishing? After all, the last most Mainers heard from Linda Bean wasn’t related to business at all, but rather when she was on television, running as a conservative Republican candidate for U.S. Congress nearly two decades ago.

Turns out Bean’s interests in conservative politics and in shoring up Maine’s primary resource industries have shared origins on a rural farm in Windsor.

The farm was the work of her second husband, Verne Jones, who was born in 1903 and, at the time they married in the mid-1970s, still had a Goldwater ’64 bumper sticker on his truck. Bean was a Kennedy Democrat. “He allowed me to put this big campaign picture of Jimmy Carter on the side of the barn,” she says with a laugh. “We were so different in so many ways, but we had a great marriage.”

But as she lived and worked with him on the farm, she slowly began to see things through his eyes. “He grew up at a time when there was no income tax, no social security, and people really relied on their own resources and took care of each other,” she recalls. “By the time I came along he couldn’t even turn around in his own property without a permit. The people on the planning board had come from away, and they were very idealistic and didn’t want anything to change, except wanting to install streetlights and things like that.”

“I began to see the light when I saw there was this mentality of rugged individualism on one hand — where you took care of yourself — and then on the other there was one where you let government interfere and come and protect you with another law here and another ordinance there,” she says. “It was all going adversely against my husband and all the other guys who had spent their whole lives in free enterprise and trying their best to take care of their children.”

She’s been a champion of rugged individualists — farmers, fishermen, and lumbermen — ever since. But she’s also been one of Maine’s most reliable supporters of conservative candidates and causes. In the ’70s she founded a short lived conservative newspaper, the Maine Paper, and spearheaded the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in Maine. She spent $1.4 million of her own money in unsuccessful bids for U.S. Congress in 1988 and 1992, and served as the Maine finance director for Patrick Buchanan’s 1996 presidential run. She’s given generously to the campaigns of ultraconservative candidates like the late Helen Chenoweth (famous for holding Congressional hearings on “black helicopter” operations in her native Idaho) and North Carolina’s Jesse Helms (who opposed civil rights legislation and the federal financing of AIDS research.)

While her core principles are libertarian — she was a high-profile supporter of Ron Paul last year — she’s also a social conservative, supporting groups and candidates opposed to gay rights, gay marriage, abortion, and multiculturalism. She is a trustee of the Eagle Forum, the influential “pro-family” interest group of her close friend Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative Republican icon. She’s supported the Maine Grassroots Coalition (whose core mission is to “adamantly defend traditional marriage”) and Concerned Maine Families (which fought against anti-discrimination laws protecting homosexuals.)

“Those are biblically-based issues with me,” explains Bean, who is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which teaches that the Bible is infallible and homosexuality sinful. “It’s helped me to go to the Bible for direction  — there’s a lot of truth in it, and it’s a great book of learning if people would take time with it.”

Her political activities must have made for occasional tension at L.L. Bean board meetings, given that her cousin Leon Gorman and his wife give to Democratic causes. (After Bean’s 1992 Congressional bid, gay activists in Philadelphia organized a brief boycott of the company.) But in recent years, Bean says they’ve come together on two issues: gambling and the environment.

Indeed, members of the Bean clan gave $175,000 to Casinos No! in 2007 and $260,000 in 2008, accounting for more than 40 percent of all donations to the group. Last year Linda, who refuses to sell lottery tickets at her Port Clyde store, gave $45,000. She says gambling is harmful and contrary to Maine values: “We don’t need it. If other states want it, fine, but this is Maine.”

Bean says the family increasingly finds common ground on green issues, including her current effort to get Maine lobster certified as a sustainable product by the London-based Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). “I appreciate a little more that we’re on a planet that needs to be protected, and I’m going kind of green,” she says, with biodegradable packaging and an advertising campaign touting the Maine lobster fishery’s environmentally friendly practices. And with major retailers like Wal-Mart requiring all wild-caught seafood to have MSC certification, she says it makes good business sense, too.

“I hope I can take what I make as an L.L. Bean shareholder and put it to use in creating a more viable, growing lobster fishing community that can pass it on to their kids and grandkids,” she says as a visitor finishes one of her very plump lobster rolls. “It gives me great pleasure to do that, honestly. It really does.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ms. Bean, the sixty-eight-year old granddaughter of L.L. Bean founder Leon Leonwood Bean, strolls along the top of the newly restored wooden dam of her Port Clyde lobster pound and points out the shallow cove where, come fall, she’ll begin hoarding tens of thousands of lobsters for the winter market. That morning, lobstermen were unloading their catch at her dock even as her drivers brought in truckloads from other wharves in Tenant’s Harbor and Vinalhaven. Her lobsters are now in the tanks of a wooden building overlooking the pound, awaiting their onward connections. Those bound for Bean’s live lobster customers bear a tag declaring their harbor of origin and the logo of her company.
“There’s a taste — a sweetness and texture quality — about the midcoast lobster that’s noticeable,” she says. “I want my fishermen to be able to go to Las Vegas on vacation and be able to see lobsters tagged from their community and to take pride in the quality and where they’re from.”
“There’s an opportunity here to make ourselves stronger,” she says of the world economic upheaval. “I hope we’re doing something about it.”
She sure seems to be. By the time you read this, Bean will have opened her Rockland lobster processing plant — the only such facility in midcoast Maine — which will churn out lobster stew, lobster salad, shrimp-and-lobster pie, and enough claw and knuckle meat to keep half the Northeast in generously stuffed lobster rolls. These products will be on offer in the display cases of two thousand supermarkets across the country under the Linda Bean’s Perfect Maine brand. This summer she’ll be selling them from her own chain of takeout kiosks and restaurants with locations in Portland, Freeport, Port Clyde, Camden, Searsport, and Delray Beach, Florida (home to a significant part of the native Maine diaspora).
Linda Bean is building Maine’s first vertically integrated lobster empire, a project that promises to keep much more of the supply chain right here in Maine. And she says she’s doing it to help shore up an industry and way of life that is essential to coastal Maine’s identity.
“This is more than an investment for my family and my children, it’s for the fishermen,” she says, seated at the lunch counter of the Port Clyde General Store, which she also owns. “They’re the endangered species, not the lobster. There’s plenty of lobster out there, but if they can’t make more than they are making now and have more stability in what their expectations can be every year, we’re not going to have them anymore.”
Until recently, Maine’s lobster industry had been enjoying a decade-long boom. While other fisheries were collapsing, lobstermen saw their combined annual catch jump from a respectable 21.7 million pounds in 1988 to more than 75 million pounds in 2006. Overall landings have dipped slightly since, but scientists see no sign that the lobster population is in danger.
But the lobster industry hasn’t been without its problems. The long real estate boom put pressure on commercial wharf and boatyard owners to sell to developers or wealthy retirees; of the state’s 5,300 miles of shorefront, only twenty miles remain as working waterfront, according to a 2007 survey by Rockland’s Island Institute. Volatile fuel and bait prices pinched lobstermen’s profits, just as they faced an expensive transition to new right whale-friendly gear.
Then there was Iceland.
When world credit markets shutdown last fall, Iceland’s banking sector collapsed, severing credit lines to their clients, which included many of the Canadian processors that buy the majority of Maine’s peak October catch. With consumer demand in freefall, prices paid to lobstermen fell to as low as $1.90 from $4.25 the year before. “We definitely took a hit in October,” says Patrice McCarron, the executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “You can’t fish if you’re not going to make any money, and there aren’t a lot of backup employment possibilities in Maine.”
For Bean, the events only confirmed what she had long suspected: that Maine’s dependence on Canadian processors was undermining local fishermen and dealers. “Canada has taken us by the throat,” she says whenever the issue comes up, pointing out that Maine has only three processors to consume the early fall glut of softshells, lobsters who’ve recently molted and are too weak to survive the live lobster trade.
“I’m very dismayed by the fact that we don’t have more processing in Maine — and that there’s no processing plant here in the most productive county in the state,” she says. “Canada’s been naming the price for a long time and a lot of dealers have lost a lot of money when they can’t get a good price.”
Her solution: build up local processing capacity, starting with Knox County, home to the state’s most productive lobster grounds. Her “buying stations” — the docks where lobstermen sell their catch — will send softshells not to Portland or Canada but to her Rockland plant, a converted scallop-processing facility. The shorter trip means more of the recently molted lobsters will survive, which is good for business, and the jobs and tax revenues stay in Maine. But if things go as planned, the greatest benefit will be a reliable source of demand to feed her growing retail stores and brands. (This year she expects her companies will handle three million pounds of lobster, one-twentieth of Maine’s catch.)
That’s where Bean’s heritage comes in handy. Successful merchandising seems to run in the family. Her grandfather started perhaps Maine’s most successful brand; her mother, Hazel Dyer, defined L.L. Bean’s ladies department in the 1960s and 1970s; her first cousin Leon Gorman transformed the family business into a global powerhouse. “If I have some of those genes, I’ll be so grateful,” she says with a laugh.
Lobster doesn’t have to just be a commodity, she reasons, and consumers will pay extra for a product they know to be high quality, wild-caught, and sustainably harvested. “I liken it to Frank Perdue coming on TV a few years ago,” she says. “We all used to think chicken was chicken, but he said ‘we only buy the best, plumpest chicken from the Delmarva Peninsula and that’s a Perdue chicken!’ It added value because it was branded, and that’s what I want to do.”
Dane Somers, executive director of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council, thinks Bean is onto something, particularly in affixing her live lobsters with their harbor of origin. “It’s an outstanding example of what you can do when you link a product to its source,” he says. “Lobsters are evocative of people’s vacations and memories of the Maine coast and they can become like that favorite wine you value because you once came across a
little vineyard and liked its product and know who makes it and how it’s done. It becomes an experience.”
“It’s a direct branding of a Maine product — it’s fresh caught and you know where it’s caught,” says McCarron. “It’s great to see someone step forward and put that into a business plan.”
But if Bean is onto a good idea, it still leaves an intriguing question: Why would an independently wealthy woman in her late sixties without any experience in the seafood industry invest her time and capital in the notoriously fickle world of fishing? After all, the last most Mainers heard from Linda Bean wasn’t related to business at all, but rather when she was on television, running as a conservative Republican candidate for U.S. Congress nearly two decades ago.
Turns out Bean’s interests in conservative politics and in shoring up Maine’s primary resource industries have shared origins on a rural farm in Windsor.
The farm was the work of her second husband, Verne Jones, who was born in 1903 and, at the time they married in the mid-1970s, still had a Goldwater ’64 bumper sticker on his truck. Bean was a Kennedy Democrat. “He allowed me to put this big campaign picture of Jimmy Carter on the side of the barn,” she says with a laugh. “We were so different in so many ways, but we had a great marriage.”
But as she lived and worked with him on the farm, she slowly began to see things through his eyes. “He grew up at a time when there was no income tax, no social security, and people really relied on their own resources and took care of each other,” she recalls. “By the time I came along he couldn’t even turn around in his own property without a permit. The people on the planning board had come from away, and they were very idealistic and didn’t want anything to change, except wanting to install streetlights and things like that.”
“I began to see the light when I saw there was this mentality of rugged individualism on one hand — where you took care of yourself — and then on the other there was one where you let government interfere and come and protect you with another law here and another ordinance there,” she says. “It was all going adversely against my husband and all the other guys who had spent their whole lives in free enterprise and trying their best to take care of their children.”
She’s been a champion of rugged individualists — farmers, fishermen, and lumbermen — ever since. But she’s also been one of Maine’s most reliable supporters of conservative candidates and causes. In the ’70s she founded a short lived conservative newspaper, the Maine Paper, and spearheaded the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in Maine. She spent $1.4 million of her own money in unsuccessful bids for U.S. Congress in 1988 and 1992, and served as the Maine finance director for Patrick Buchanan’s 1996 presidential run. She’s given generously to the campaigns of ultraconservative candidates like the late Helen Chenoweth (famous for holding Congressional hearings on “black helicopter” operations in her native Idaho) and North Carolina’s Jesse Helms (who opposed civil rights legislation and the federal financing of AIDS research.)
While her core principles are libertarian — she was a high-profile supporter of Ron Paul last year — she’s also a social conservative, supporting groups and candidates opposed to gay rights, gay marriage, abortion, and multiculturalism. She is a trustee of the Eagle Forum, the influential “pro-family” interest group of her close friend Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative Republican icon. She’s supported the Maine Grassroots Coalition (whose core mission is to “adamantly defend traditional marriage”) and Concerned Maine Families (which fought against anti-discrimination laws protecting homosexuals.)
“Those are biblically-based issues with me,” explains Bean, who is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which teaches that the Bible is infallible and homosexuality sinful. “It’s helped me to go to the Bible for direction — there’s a lot of truth in it, and it’s a great book of learning if people would take time with it.”
Her political activities must have made for occasional tension at L.L. Bean board meetings, given that her cousin Leon Gorman and his wife give to Democratic causes. (After Bean’s 1992 Congressional bid, gay activists in Philadelphia organized a brief boycott of the company.) But in recent years, Bean says they’ve come
together on two issues: gambling and the environment.
Indeed, members of the Bean clan gave $175,000 to Casinos No! in 2007 and $260,000 in 2008, accounting for more than 40 percent of all donations to the group. Last year Linda, who refuses to sell lottery tickets at her Port Clyde store, gave $45,000. She says gambling is harmful and contrary to Maine values: “We don’t need it. If other states want it, fine, but this is Maine.”
Bean says the family increasingly finds common ground on green issues, including her current effort to get Maine lobster certified as a sustainable product by the London-based Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). “I appreciate a little more that we’re on a planet that needs to be protected, and I’m going kind of green,” she says, with biodegradable packaging and an advertising campaign touting the Maine lobster fishery’s environmentally friendly practices. And with major retailers like Wal-Mart requiring all wild-caught seafood to have MSC certification, she says it makes good business sense, too.
“I hope I can take what I make as an L.L. Bean shareholder and put it to use in creating a more viable, growing
lobster fishing community that can pass it on to their kids and grandkids,” she says as a visitor finishes one of her very plump lobster rolls. “It gives me great pleasure to do that, honestly. It really does.”