Business View Magazine | May 2019

171 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MAY 2019 LOUI SBOURG SEAFOODS , LTD . raise their young kids. They saw opportunities to do something with the fishery in Louisbourg, which was very active, so they quit their jobs and started a stevedoring company; basically, unloading the fish vessels that were landing in Louisbourg. There were a lot of them. Business grew and they began buying lobsters from local fishermen. With the increased revenue, they purchased their first fish plant (groundfish) in 1991, around the time that groundfish went into moratorium. But Jim saw potential opportunities in other species that weren’t strictly under moratorium, so they operated that groundfish plant for years by processing flatfish – grey sole, flounders, yellow tails. They developed unique markets in the U.S. and got a reasonable price.” In 1999, the crab industry in Atlantic Canada was booming and the Kennedys converted the groundfish plant to a snow crab processing plant. That has become the anchor for the rest of the companies under the Louisbourg Seafoods group. Today, they operate four fish processing facilities: A crab plant in Louisbourg, Nova Scotia; a snow crab processing plant in Glace Bay, Cape Breton; a shrimp processing plant in North Sydney, Cape Breton; and a small facility for crab and lobster processing in Canso on mainland Nova Scotia. They also have a live lobster holding facility in Louisbourg. It was an abandoned fish processing facility that Jim purchased and repurposed; it can hold approximately 400,000 pounds of live lobster. pictured Owner, Lori Kennedy