Business View Magazine | September 2019

153 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 Iceberg Select mussels are hand-graded and inspected before shipping, as live in mesh, live in poly, or live in bulk for further processing. Speaking to the origins of Badger Bay Mussel Farms, Roberts recalls, “We started back in 1988, so we just passed 30 years. We started out pretty small; made a lot of mistakes. Part of the reason we started aquaculture was, really, I didn’t want to move away from home; wanted to see if I could make a living here. The first thought was I was going to get into salmon but that never lasted very long, so I figured I’d get into something that was a little bit easier to grow, which would be mussels. The first year, we ended up with a lot of seed but we had a big storm and lost a lot of the mussel stock; only ended up with about eight or nine hundred. My first harvest in 1990/91 was about 25,000 pounds, which, by today’s standards, is not very much. We started off with three sites – about 50 or 60 hectares – and kept on expanding. We were growing mussels and selling them to another buyer for about 14 years and that didn’t seem to grow the company too much, because when we got the mussels grown, we couldn’t sell them, and we had a job getting paid.” Sixteen years ago, in 2003, Roberts approached Craig Allen at Allen’s Fisheries on the west coast of Newfoundland and asked if Badger Bay could process the mussels at his plant, and then market and sell them from there. Allen agreed, and that was the beginning of a long and valuable business relationship that continues today. “The first production of mussels we processed under our own brand was 5,000 pounds a week,” says Roberts. “And now, it’s over 100,000 pounds per week. We started off with 50 hectares of water back in ’88 and then we applied for more. Five to seven years ago (time goes so fast), we bought three enterprises from other farmers, over three years. Then we bought another one out this spring. That business had more water and more sites, because each of those growers that sold out had multiple sites. So, we started out with three sites and now we have 23 sites and over 1,000 hectares of water.” The Canadian aquaculture industry involves several government agencies, including the Coast BADGER BAY MUSSEL FARMS , LTD .