ES Seafood Resumes Business After Closing In 2007

By CAROL VAUGHN
The Daily Times of Salisbury

OLNEY, Va. (AP) -- Crabmeat from Eastern Shore Seafood once again graces local tables after Woody and Andrea Zember opened their custom crab-picking operation two weeks ago.

Zember was the third generation of his family to own the former Eastern Shore Seafood Co. Inc. on Bayside Road outside Onancock, which processed and sold local crabmeat for a half century until competition from Asian imports forced it to close in 2007. But Zember always looked for a way to get back into business.

"It's in my blood -- I've got to do it," he said.

His grandfather, Stanley "Jack" Johnson, founded Eastern Shore Seafood, which in its heyday had some 50 workers picking as many as 350 bushels a day of crabs.

The Zembers resumed business last month on a much smaller scale in a building behind their home in Onley under a state provision that allows for custom crab-picking operations with up to three people working at a time.

Woody Zember cooks crabs and does paperwork for the business when he is not working at his day job at Cherrystone Farms, while Andrea makes deliveries. They both weigh the containers themselves.

"We go through every pound," said Zember.

The company will keep its emphasis on quality rather than quantity, he said. "What we are stressing is quality crabmeat hand-picked the old-fashioned way."

The location does not include a retail shop --Andrea Zember makes deliveries to customers at local offices and homes, where she said the product sells itself after she shows up with her cooler filled with one-pound containers of freshly-picked crabmeat.

The containers sport a label featuring a blue crab holding an American flag designed by Lizzie Lawson of Cape Charles, a graphic design major at Radford University.

"We're selling out every day," she said -- even on their first day of deliveries, Aug. 26, when area residents were scurrying to prepare for Hurricane Irene, predicted to strike the next day.

Buyers didn't seem worried about buying perishable crabmeat, despite dire warnings about possible electrical outages from the storm. It wasn't going to have to last that long. "They said, 'Ooo, that could go good tonight'," she said.

The product can't get much fresher. One day recently, for example, Zember was delivering crabmeat that had been picked in the morning. "I headed out the door at 1 o'clock and sold out by 1:30," she said.

Asked why he chose to resume business now, Zember said a combination of factors made it feasible -- including the Chesapeake Bay crab population's recovery, likely due at least in part to the small number of watermen left, and the accompanying drop in prices.

At the same time, imported crabmeat is becoming harder to get and its price is going up.

"They're realizing they may be over-fishing their industry. That gives you a little window of opportunity," Zember said, adding "a lot of vessels have been held out at sea" because the United States is ramping up inspections of the foreign product, a large percentage of which according to some recent reports contains contaminants that are banned in the United States.

Andrea Zember is incensed that some area restaurants prepare dishes using imported crabmeat -- perhaps mixed in with a little local product -- and then give customers the impression they are eating locally caught crabs.

"People don't know what they are eating. They should ask, and ask to see the can."

But the most important factor in Zember's decision to go back into business is that "people on the East Coast have turned back to the fact that they want Chesapeake Bay crabmeat. People are waking up now," he said.

The custom-picking operation actually produces a superior product to more large-scale businesses, Zember said, because the crabs are cooked as one would cook them at home and retain their moisture and flavor better than crabs cooked under pressure in a commercial facility.

Several former employees have come back to work, even though it has been over three years since Eastern Shore Seafood closed.

"They have been picking for me 40-some years," he said, adding former workers kept calling to urge him to go back into business.

For Zember, the reborn business is literally a dream come true.

"Every night for the last three years I have picked crabs in my mind. I used to call them nightmares -- now they're dreams."

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)