By freezing his catch at sea, La. shrimper turns the tide on his business

To survive, many shrimpers began fishing more and selling shrimp directly to local customers rather than to middlemen on the dock. Nacio decided to invest in his business. In 2001, he put the Anna Marie, a 55-foot steel boat, on the water. By shrimping standards, that’s a medium-size boat. The Anna Marie is in a “sweet spot,” Nacio says: large enough to sustain rough weather and carry in a sizable haul; small enough to keep expenses on diesel reasonable.

With larger hauls, Nacio started to pay a contractor to freeze and store shrimp for him. He also began to sell directly to Rouse’s, a local grocery chain. The move allowed him to cut out some but not all of the middlemen. The rest would come in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina.

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(Sean Gardner/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) - Part of shrimper Lance Nacio’s catch.

Nacio’s business was spared by that storm. (Indeed, he remembers heading out three days after the storm to “Forrest Gump”-like shrimping conditions.) But Hurricane Rita hit him hard. He lost about 10,000 pounds of shrimp stored in a warehouse that was flooded with seven feet of water.

The storms generated sympathy and interest — and low-cost loans — for local fishermen. Nacio used one to install the freezers on his deck. The equipment, which freezes seafood almost instantly on large steel plates, had long been used in the big commercial fisheries in Alaska and Canada. But it was new to the shrimp industry, and it transformed Nacio’s business. He could chill, box and freeze up to 2,000 pounds of shrimp every six hours, and he could stay out on the water longer, netting more shrimp per haul and therefore using less gas per pound. More important, it allowed him to preserve the sweetness and firm texture of fresh shrimp and sell them all year long to local and national customers.

The quality has impressed customers. “I mean, ask anybody: What’s better, fresh or frozen? And the answer is fresh,” says chef Brigsten. “But if you buy [Nacio’s] frozen head-on shrimp . . . they are as pristine as any fresh shrimp you’ll ever find.”

Andrea Reusing, chef at the Lantern restaurant in Chapel Hill, N.C., recently began buying from Nacio. “It was an incredibly gutsy move to invest in a totally new system and idea of freezing shrimp on the boat, since chefs almost always associate frozen shrimp with poor quality,” she says. “With each new chef, including me, Lance has to convince them to withhold judgment and just taste them. He is gaining quite a few converts, and his process looks like it could offer some real solutions for shrimping families who want to move into direct marketing their catch.”

So far, the gulf oil spill, which began when BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caught fire on April 20, 2010, hasn’t affected Nacio’s business. He made good money working the cleanup. By that September, he was out fishing again and logging record catches. (In his first 30 days of fishing, he netted 40,000 pounds of shrimp.)

But the long-term impact of the spill on the shrimp industry is not yet clear. Shrimp are a reliable annual crop, so plentiful that there are no quotas or limits for shrimpers. This year, landings are the worst they’ve been in a decade, according to Brian Marks, a University of Arizona researcher who is studying the social and economic effects of the oil spill on coastal communities. “It was a phenomenal year last year, but what happens now?” says Nacio. “If the shrimp is down for the next four or five years, how do we respond?”

His answer: By doing more of what he is already doing. More marketing. More brokering. “That’s how you grow,” says Nacio. “I like it. But it’s not the same as being out on the water.”

Recipe:

Louisiana Shrimp Cornbread

Black, a former Food section staffer, writes the Smarter Food column monthly. Follow her on Twitter @jane_black.