How Luke’s Lobster gets seafood from the docks to your doorstep

Luke Holden and Ben Conniff, the cofounders of 12-year-old Luke’s Lobster, based in Portland, Maine, think of their certified B Corp, fittingly, as a boat.

“If we look out for our suppliers, our team, our customers, all ships rise,” Holden says. “But the reality is, with COVID, it was just like, ‘Let’s keep all ships from sinking.’”

Last April, Luke’s was in Titanic mode, with all of their 26 domestic “shacks” shutting down (except for the Portland flagship), employees furloughed, and massive summer purchasing commitments to their fishermen just over the horizon like an encroaching hurricane.

“It was terrifying for us, and terrifying on behalf of our whole fishery to think of the fact that 70% of what they take out of the ocean gets consumed in restaurants,” Conniff says. “We needed a way to address the fact that the place where people eat seafood is not a place where they’re going to be able to eat seafood. We needed [customers] to take [seafood] to their homes.”

Spearheaded by two senior employees who learned e-commerce on the fly, Luke’s had a direct-to-consumer online marketplace set up and running in a week, and by the end of April, had shipped $86,506 worth of lobster, crab, and crustacean-adjacent products across the country.

What began as a watertight door preventing the company from going under has grown into a substantial revenue stream; sales last December were $647,755. Even now, as 17 shacks have reopened and the end of the pandemic feels like an optimistic possibility, “e-commerce is here to stay,” Holden says.

A lobster, it should be pointed out, is not a jar of pickles or a box of pears. The king of crustaceans is a finicky creature that requires first-class pampering during its voyage. Underpinning that process at every step of the way is technology, both mechanical and computerized.

Here’s how Luke’s gets its lobster from the dock in Portland to the doorstep of Anytown, USA.

Catching

“Obviously we want to go fishing on a nice day,” says commercial fisherman Justin Papkee. So before he even unties his boat, F/V Pull N’ Pray, from his wharf (one of two managed by Luke’s) in Long Island, Maine, and steers out into Casco Bay, he’s checking weather apps. Not the generic one that comes preloaded onto your iPhone, but detailed professional versions like Windy, Dark Sky, and the NOAA’s app, which let users “click on all the individual weather buoy stations, and it’ll show you the wind speed, wave height, water temperature, atmospheric pressure,” Papkee says. “The old-timers used to have go out past the headlight, and if it was too rough, they just turned around. Now I can sit at home before we even leave, and I can pull up the weather buoy, which is telling me exactly what the wind and waves are doing.”

Once on the water, Papkee engages the Pull N’ Pray’ s central nervous system, a $30,000 Furuno suite of navigation and communication technology. (He was a formerly a Garmin guy, but converted last year after a fire on board necessitated a complete hardware replacement.) The most valuable tool is the 3D Sonar Visualizer F3D-S. “It shows a 3D picture of the bottom of the ocean, which is helpful when you’re dropping traps,” which the lobsters crawl into. Papkee steams out with 800 traps to drop, hauls through half of them (hopefully with lobsters inside), and heads back to Luke’s holding facility at Portland Pier with the help of his other favorite piece of technology and “best friend”: autopilot. “I have it all set up so that when we’re done at the end of the day, I click on a point, and the boat will take us from wherever we are almost into the dock. The only thing it doesn’t do is dock itself.”

Holding

Papkee’s boat is just one of eight to 12 (depending on the season) docking at Luke’s buying and holding facility on Portland Pier each day.

“This is where we store the lobsters and grade them for sale by shell quality and size, as well as warehouse product from five other wharfs on the coast of Maine that we contract with to buy their production,” says Jeff Holden, Luke’s father, who’s been in the lobster business since the 1960s and runs the show here. “[Lobster holding systems range from] what you would find in a world-class aquarium to just pumping seawater out of the bay.”

Luke’s is somewhere in between, taking advantage of its location right on the ocean (many holding facilities are inland) as well as using a network of automated air circulators, toxin filters, and temperature monitors to keep the biologically treated water clean and the crustaceans cool and comfortable. It’s a two-tank system. First, the lobsters go into the purge tank, where they void any leftover food in their digestive systems, then they relocate to the short-term storage tank.

A Luke’s Lobster near Manhattan’s Union Square on Sept. 16, 2020.

Temperature is especially important, according to Jeff: “The warmer the water, the less oxygen it holds, and the more active the lobsters become.”

Active lobsters can inadvertently injure or kill one another, resulting in shrinkage; maintaining a water temperature between the high 30s to low 40s helps guard against that. While other facilities can hold catches for several months, Luke’s lobsters continue their journey within days. Live whole lobsters remain here until shipping, while the majority proceed immediately to the next step: processing.

Mechanical processing

Refrigerated trucks transport the lobsters about 20 miles south along the coast to Saco, Maine, home to Luke’s processing plant, where the lobsters are electrically stunned (generally considered the most humane method of slaughtering crustaceans) and separated into parts, and then proceed to cooking. Paul Hewey, Luke’s director of fabrication, engineered a continuous steam convection oven with a computer program that follows eight different time-and-temperature calibrations—two for tails, one for legs, one for bodies, four for claws, depending on the size and grade of shell thickness.

Hewey and his team of mechanical engineers, fabricators, and master welders retrofit existing processing equipment, as well as outright design their own, to maximize quality, efficiency, and extraction on the processing line: the leg roller, the spin sheller, the tail splitter, the claw saw. “What would take you a week to do by hand, you can do in a day,” Hewey says.

His newest invention turns lobster shells, formerly sent to the compost bin, into a value-added product. The carcasses travel through a cooker, chopper, spinner, and washer to remove any residual protein, after which they’re dried and ground. “Before we used to pay to get it off [shells]. Now this waste can be used for a bunch of different things,” including fertilizer and a biodegradable alternative to single-use plastics.

Picking

Despite the technological ingenuity at Luke’s, you can’t do it all by machine. “Handpicking is something that technology has not been able to solve for,” says cofounder Luke. “We’ll process about 35,000 unique lobsters a day. During a six-hour shift, 20 to 25 pickers can extract the meat from the arms and knuckles of 70,000 claws, which is mind-boggling. They’re masters of their trade.”

Yean Kim, an eight-year employee of Luke’s, is one of those masters. “The way I do it, I’m really concerned about quality, meaning that I try not to have any shells or filaments,” Kim says. “A machine can’t really pick up a lot of what a human being can.” Kim produces 25 to 30 pounds of pristine picked lobster meat a day. She can’t say for sure if she’s the most prolific extractor on the line, “but I think I might be.”

Freezing

With few exceptions, the lobster customers order from Luke’s online store arrives frozen. Frozen lobster being shipped across the world is nothing new, “but the quality was dismal for a long time,” Conniff says. “The longer [a lobster] takes to freeze, the larger the ice crystals that are going to form, the more that’s going to disrupt the flavor or texture. When those big ice crystals [thaw], water’s going to rush right out of the meat, which will be hydrated and ruptured.”

Luke’s uses liquid nitrogen to freeze its retail products—twin-tail packs and the one-pound packs of knuckle and claw meat that star in its popular DIY lobster-roll kits—to negative 10 degrees.

“With liquid nitrogen, those ice crystals are so infinitesimally small that they make no change to the tissue. Therefore you find that a liquid nitrogen product is actually going to be better than a fresh refrigerated temperature for a few days,” Conniff says. “It allows you to preserve quality rather than damage quality.”

This extended storage capability creates a more sustainable product from a carbon footprint standpoint, since frozen product formerly airfreighted to Asia can now travel by container ship.

Packing and shipping

After freezing, an automated line seals, labels, and packs the frozen lobster. The packing team coordinates with the fulfillment team, who have a stack of overnight-shipping UPS labels that auto-generate as orders flow in from the website. Luke’s online store runs on Shopify, software neither Lauren Gibson, vice president of e-commerce and retail, nor Meaghan Dillon, marketing director, had worked with before the pandemic.

“E-commerce was always sort of on the back burner—we’ll do it eventually, maybe 2021, 2022,” Dillon says. “And then overnight, Luke said, ‘We’re doing it next week.’”

A roll from a Luke’s Lobster in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.

“We didn’t have any experience with direct-to-consumer platforms, so I was literally just creating a Google sheet of all the different options and comparing everything from things I had read about customer service to payment processing fees to how they could accommodate our unique tax situation, shipping from Maine to a lot of different states,” Gibson says. “Overwhelmingly we heard Shopify was really wonderful and would be especially great for a team that had very little experience with managing and updating a platform like this.”

When the shop went live last April, “we were absolutely shocked on day one,” Dillon says. “I think we got, like, 50 orders, and we were just kind of blown away.” A few weeks later, during the lead up to Mother’s Day, there were “hundreds and hundreds” of orders, she recalls.

“We had the entire corporate team and everybody else who had not been furloughed on the floor, sweating, running around, trying to get orders packed on that day, knowing that the UPS truck was going to show up at 3 p.m.,” Conniff says.

“Not only was it crucial [to the company’s survival], it was a real morale boost,” Gibson says. “People were laid off, shacks were closing; it was a really dark time, and this new venture was really exciting to work on.”

Order processing is only half the logistical battle. Shipping is an equally imposing challenge.

“Lobster is not like shipping beef for your weekly meals,” Dillon says. “It’s oftentimes a gift, or for celebrating something special, or sending something to someone in the pandemic who couldn’t visit Maine this year.” The special-occasion aura (and price) of lobster heightens the stakes and, therefore, the pressure on Luke’s supply chain to deliver a perfect product to customers’ doorsteps. Packers secure the temperature of the frozen lobster with dry ice, and UPS still comes at 3 p.m. Every afternoon. There’s less scrambling these days, but still some sweating. Notes Dillon: “The quality of our product is something we take extremely seriously.”