Louisbourg Seafoods, Ltd.

Louisbourg Seafoods currently employs around 500 people, and Jim and Lori continue to look for unique opportunities to reinvest back in the fishery and create more long-term sustainable jobs in the small coastal communities where they’re needed. Jim Kennedy explains, “I ran the business and Lori ran the office and it worked out well. Lori’s not involved in the office anymore, she’s on the board of the World Ocean Council (WOC) and does a fair amount of travel, globally, for that. She’s also done a lot of work on the PR front, promoting the product and the modern- day brand. We distribute all the different species we harvest and process under the Mira Bay brand. It’s named after a famous song by Rita McNeil. We were trying to capture some of the recognition around that song. And we live on the Mira River here, so it was a natural way to attach the Mira recognition to a seafood brand.” Company operations run the gamut. MacLean notes, “We hold in-shore and off-shore licenses; we’re not fully vertically integrated but we do harvesting and processing and marketing. Where we’ve been trying to create some identity is in what the government calls secondary species - species that aren’t harvested at a high level. Through discussions with buyers, we began to understand there was a demand for species found off the coast of Nova Scotia that no one here was harvesting. We obtained licenses to harvest two species, in particular, sea cucumber and whelk,