Belfast food processing and storage facility to close
Workers process blueberries at Coastal Farms and Food Processing in 2013. The facility, which also included food storage and a commercial kitchen will close at the end of the month according to management. (Photo by Ethan Andrews)
Since 2012, Coastal Farms and Food Processing has occupied the 60,000-square-foot former Moss Inc. building on Route 1 in Belfast.
Workers process blueberries at Coastal Farms and Food Processing in 2013. The facility, which also included food storage and a commercial kitchen will close at the end of the month according to management. (Photo by Ethan Andrews)
Since 2012, Coastal Farms and Food Processing has occupied the 60,000-square-foot former Moss Inc. building on Route 1 in Belfast.
BELFAST - After two years in business, Coastal Farms and Food Processing will be closing its doors at the end of the month.
Speaking on Friday, Wayne Snyder, a member of the Coastal Farms management team, said the economics of the hybrid business didn’t work out as planned.
“We had a bad year for blueberries last year,” he said, “partly because of mistakes we made.”
Snyder said the business’ managers and board of directors are looking into the possibility of someone taking over all or part of the business, which comprised a commercial kitchen, storage and a separate frozen food processing line and deep freezers.
“It could be divided in two,” he said.
In the meantime, Snyder said, tenants of the facility’s commercial kitchen and storage spaces have been notified.
“There were 30 business involved, some farms and food producers, and were asking them to relocate out of here by the end of the month,” he said.
Coastal Farms and Food Processing was conceived by former City Councilor Jan Anderson as a way to serve farmers and small scale food entrepreneurs. Anderson teamed up with veteran blueberry processor Tony Kelly and Snyder, a retired commercial developer, and opened the business in 2012 in the former Moss Inc. manufacturing facility on Route 1.
The 60,000-square-foot warehouse was retrofit with an industrial scale food processing and freezing line, used primarily for blueberries. Another portion of the building housed a test kitchen for small scale food processing entrepreneurs, along with dry, cold and frozen storage spaces designed to be used by farmers, restaurants and other food producers and processors.
As Anderson described in 2013, the known factors of blueberry processing supported the untested aspects of Coastal Farms, like the commercial kitchen and food storage in their early stages.
Snyder said Kelly, who managed the blueberry processing side of the business, was laid off last September.
The commercial kitchen currently has ten tenants, and roughly 30 customers use the storage lockers, he said.
The number of employees at the facility fluctuated widely depending upon the season, he said. When the blueberry line was running, there could be 35 to 40 people. In the winter, the staff might be as small as five or six, he said.
Snyder said Coastal Farms still has two years left on its lease of the building. At this point, he said, it’s hard to know what will happen.
“There are a lot of moving parts to this so it’s hard to give answers to these questions,” he said. “It depends what different players decide to do. We’re not the only player.”
Asked about the other players, Snyder mentioned creditors, lenders and the landlord.
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Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com
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