Maritech LLC is one of those companies that thinks the secret to its eventual success will lay in not putting all its fish eggs in one tank.
Based in Sebastian, the aquaculture company is angling on a bunch of different fronts these days, including the commercial food fish market, the commercial saltwater ornamental fish business and a new, untapped market as a supplier to commercial aquariums and zoos.
Although Maritech is not the only aquaculture company on the Treasure Coast, with its diversity, it has to be considered the most ambitious.
Company officials are hoping that in the not-too-distant future what you order off the menu at Red Lobster, buy in the seafood department at Publix, bring home as marine pets or take your children to see at SeaWorld will have some connection to Maritech.
“We’re a self-sustained (research and development) company that’s commercializing in several areas,” said Rod Reed, the company’s chief executive officer. “We will continue to grow and spin off these different opportunities. Marine life is the last of the food sources to be domesticated. What we’re trying to do is domesticate marine warm-water fin fish. The ocean is not going to supply the needs for seafood.”
These plans and statements are not whale tales to be discarded.
The company, which has roots in Fort Pierce, occupies a 50,000-square-foot facility off 99th Street with room to expand on the 4-acre site that it leases. It also has an agreement with the Florida Institute of Technology that allows the company to conduct research at the institute’s oceanfront marine laboratory in Vero Beach.
It is in the process of readying a production facility on a 4-acre site in Nassau, Bahamas. This, again, is a lease/purchase agreement, for an existing facility that includes 44 production tanks, each capable of holding 17,000 gallons.
Maritech, with an annual payroll of $700,000, also employs 20 full- and part-time workers, 17 of them in Vero Beach. The plan is to double or triple the number of employees in three to five years, Reed said.
“We think we’re a good industry for this county because we provide good, high-tech jobs with good salaries and it’s the kind of industry that attracts other, related businesses to the community,” Reed said.
Penny Chandler, executive director of the Indian River County Chamber of Commerce, has no trouble agreeing with Reed.
“The company shows a lot of diversity and that’s what we need in this economy to make things go,” she said. “Aquaculture has definitely been a part of the discussion for the economic development mix in our community. This company is a good example of the diversity it can bring and the progress it can make.”
As good as prospects appear at the moment for Maritech, it is something that did not materialize overnight.
In fact, it has taken years of effort and as much as $20 million in total investment in more than a decade to get to this point. So concerned were they about counting their eggs before they hatched, Maritech officials put off any interviews for the better part of a year.
Incubation period
Maritech’s route to Sebastian was actually navigated through Fort Pierce.
The company is a successor company to two other aquaculture businesses that operated in Fort Pierce during the 1990s — American Aqua Resources, owned by Wesley Harris, and Atlantic Aquaculture Technologies, owned by Vero Beach businessman Andy Williams, who owns Calyx & Corolla, the high-end floral catalog business.
In 1997, Dyer Aqua LLC, a Tennessee-based company owned by Billy Walker, bought a stake in American Aqua Resources, which had been doing research on how to grow indoors a variety of high-end money fish such as snook, grouper and red drum.
At the end of 1997, American Aqua Resources bought the assets of Atlantic Aqua Resources, which had been doing research on mahi mahi and red fish.
The newly combined company then announced an ambitious plan to turn a 10-acre citrus grove on Indrio Road near Fort Pierce into a $150 million facility that would produce 60 million pounds of fish a year and employ 600 people in relatively short order, news accounts state.
An enthusiastic St. Lucie County Commission even approved some zoning changes in January 1998 to accommodate the planned enterprise, hoping the county would become “the aquaculture capital of Florida, if not the world,” in the words of one county commissioner.
However, the big plans never materialized. Company officials came and went.
Finally, Dyer Aqua bought out the assets of the company in November 1999 and formed Maritech. Today, Maritech and Dyer Aqua are one and the same.
Maritech started out corporate life in Fort Pierce, but it moved to its Sebastian facility two years ago where it has been quietly doing research and reassembling its business plan.
Reed think the new version of the old company will succeed where the other failed because it has taken a completely different approach to the business.
“We’re trying to do it in steps, going slower and being more diversified,” Reed said. “After all, we’ve had a major plan to get this accomplished since 1999. I just believe in getting there on a slow, steady path.”
A future in fish
Maritech is divided into four distinct areas, led by its scientists Bruce Calman, Nick Nevid and Tom Cornett.
First and foremost is the research and development department — led by Calman and Nevid — which, among other things, looks at ways to grow foods for fish that make them grow faster and healthier, even in confinement.
The company is going after the saltwater ornamental fish market through a division called Proaquatix. The 2-year-old division raises 32 varieties of marine fish that are sold domestically and internationally to such countries as Spain, France and England. The division generates about $500,000 in sales a year.
This market is one that Reed thinks Maritech can easily dominate, principally because of the lack of competition.
Although the freshwater ornamental market has no shortage of players — there are about 300 farmers in Florida alone — the saltwater market has just three that supply the United States, said Reed. Those are Proaquatix, a division at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce and a company called Sea-Quest in Puerto Rico.
The reason there is so little competition in the saltwater ornamental market is that it is much harder to do saltwater ornamentals than freshwater ornamentals, Reed said.
“We feel comfortable we will dominate sales in three to five years because of our ability to produce a wide variety of fish,” Reed said.
The commercial food fish area — under the direction of Cornett — is another market that Maritech officials think they can have an impact.
The company, which has the ability to grow red drum, black drum, sea trout, cobia and pompano, is working with Savon Foods of St. Petersburg, which, in turn, works with Publix and Darden (parent of Red Lobster and Olive Garden).
Publix and Darden, Reed said, have agreed to buy fish from Maritech when production starts in about nine months. The facility in the Bahamas can initially produce 360,000 pounds of pompano a year, he added.
New York calling
The company also is contemplating putting an indoor production facility in New York, partly to tap into the large Kosher market there. Officials from the state of New York are scheduled to visit Maritech in the next week in a bid to encourage the company to place a facility there.
“New York has solicited us because it wants more agriculture in the state and aquaculture falls into that category,” Reed said.
The fourth and final area for the company was something of an accidental market. Because one of the company’s employees once worked for SeaWorld in Orlando, Maritech ended up as a supplier of fish — principally pompano — for display and as a food source for bigger fish.
The company has sent fish to the Florida Aquarium in Tampa and to a zoo in Spain. It also has a back order from Six Flags Over Ohio.
“We did not anticipate getting into this angle, but there are 3,000 zoos and aquariums in the United States alone that are all looking for a supply and we can do it a lot cheaper than they can going out into the wild,” Reed said. “We can also supply year round, whereas in the wild, pompano only run seasonally.”
Reed said Maritech is the only company that’s involved in this segment so it presents a “huge opportunity.”
By Chris Kauffmann, TCPalm.com
