BELFAST - Blueberry juice. 

On Tuesday, telltale beads of the stuff trickled from under a garage door into the parking lot next to the Coastal Farms and Foods building on Route 1. Nearer to the entrance, forklift wheels had smeared the juice into a gray hatch. Across the parking lot, a tower of pristine wooden pallets stood near a tractor trailer with Newfoundland/Labrador plates.

CFF went out of business in May. But as of Monday, the blueberry processing line was up and running again under the banner Mid-Coast Frozen LLC.

Nat Lindquist, a consultant helping to oversee operations in Belfast, said the next six weeks would be spent washing, freezing and packaging shipments from Canada, where the harvest is just beginning.

The berry processing built by CFF two years ago occupies half of the 60,000-square-foot warehouse space. A separate branch of the business was dedicated to cold and dry storage for farmers and mid-level food processors, along with a commercial kitchen complex for small-scale food entrepreneurs.

Though tenants said the business had been on shaky footing for close to a year, the announcement in April that it would close, took many residents by surprise. Management said the company had taken on too much debt and fallen out of favor with a major creditor.

Equipment from the commercial kitchen was subsequently sold at public auction, but the blueberry processing line was already spoken for.

Lindquist said Mid-Coast Frozen LLC made a deal before the public sale to buy CFF’s blueberry processing equipment, including the cleaning and processing line, flash freezing tunnels and a deep freezer the size of a large house. The company also renegotiated the terms of Coastal Farms’ lease with the building owner, he said.

The building known locally as the longtime headquarters of Moss Inc, is owned by Mass.-based 248 Northport LLC, according to public records.

Lindquist previously held an executive position at Wyman’s of Maine, the state’s largest blueberry processor. He described the principals of Mid-Coast Frozen LLC as two men, hailing from Canada and Europe, respectively, and said the company operates under a Nova Scotia-based holding company called East Coast Wild Blueberries LLC.

On the surface, Mid-Coast Frozen appears to be picking up where Coastal Farms and Foods left off. But Lindquist said rather than providing a service —processing and storage — the company is buying outright from growers then selling the frozen blueberries down the distribution chain.

Lindquist declined to name specific growers or disclose the reach of the company, but said all of the blueberries would be coming from Canada, for now..

“We’ve been approached by Maine growers, but won’t process any this year,” he said.

According to Ken Ryan, Mid-Coast Frozen’s head of maintenance, he and other workers spent about a month preparing the processing facility and adding some new equipment before going online Monday.

Lindquist said the plant will employee between 25-30 employees through the harvest.

“Our goal is to make it a year-round operation, but we have a long way to go,” he said.

Ryan took a slightly different view. “Look what we’ve done in four weeks,” he said.

For now, Lindquist said Mid-Coast Frozen is only processing blueberries. Before Coastal Farms and Foods closed, the company’s management team considered freezing lobster and other local produce, but Lindquist said he didn’t envision Mid-Coast Frozen branching out like that.

Standing outside the building, with the roar of the processing room audible through the doors behind them, Lindquist and Ryan patiently answered questions about the new business. A group of workers on break when the managers came out filed back into the building.

A few minutes later, Lindquist suggested he and Ryan should probably do the same.

“It’s about to get busy,” he said.

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com