Article

Seafood Chowder Making Its’ Mark in PEI

By Kathy Birt

Getting a thick, creamy PEI seafood chowder into the market place proved to be a culinary feat that Chef Greg Aitken of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island was up for.

Whether its’ winning Best Chowder accolades in the annual Shellfish Festival in Charlottetown or feeding a thousand people in one day at the first annual Souris Food Feast, this shrink-wrapped, frozen seafood chowder is making an indelible mark in the appetites of consumers near and far.

With 19 years of cooking to his credit, this Island chef began his career with one of the top chef’s in the country. He explains that he was just 16 when he was working at the Inn at Bay Fortune and had the opportunity to intern with the well known Chef Michael Smith.

 “I was Chef Michael Smith’s protégée when he first moved up here from New York,” he says.

After cooking for a number of years, Aitken enhanced his skills by attending the Culinary Institute of Canada in Charlottetown, graduating in 1996, to continue cooking in Island restaurants.

His seafood chowder, which was quickly becoming a family favorite, was always on the menu. With no less than five seafood choices in the chowder, plenty of PEI milk and potato, white wine, and generous helpings of butter, salt, bacon, and garlic spices the seafood chowder was in demand. The 35-year-old chef says the continuous feedback from restaurants goers helped to make a collective decision to mass-produce the chowder. “One day it just came up with family members that we should go into manufacturing (the chowder),” he says.

Taking the product to the PEI Food Technology Center, the Aitkens determined there was a niche market for healthy choice seafood “convenience” chowder. That is to heat and serve

Knowing that PEI, or even Atlantic Canada seafood is amongst some of the top (seafood) in the world, the family felt strongly this chowder was market ready.

“So we decided to go with Supreme Seafood Chowder,” says Aitken and adds, “If we were going to get into (marketing) it, I wanted to take the recipe we already had…a batch of 11 liters.”

However, pursuing a federal license to market the chowder in 2005 was what he terms a “A heck of a chore.”

The source of the lobster for the seafood came from a local seafood plant in contract with the provincial government indicating their would be no secondary processing of lobster (from that plant). “The red tape tied us up for a year and a half,” explains Dona Aitken.

They were told, at one point, they could go to Nova Scotia and market their chowder, but says Greg, “I always had my food focusing on what PEI had to offer, so there was no getting up and moving to Nova Scotia, I wanted to showcase PEI.”

With a generous grant from the Dairy Board of Canada some preliminary expenses were taken care of. In fact, that grant was, in fact, the only one awarded east of Montreal. “Our chowder came in as the healthiest product on the market in Canada with the highest amount of dairy content,” he notes.

Is it any wonder the family forged ahead to get this Island seafood chowder into the market place?

Kicking things off in 2007, with a wholesale market of 2-kilo bags, Aitken says they were targeting just the wholesale market… “But all of a sudden the retail was there.”

They settled on buying their lobster from a local fisherman, whom Greg says is a second-generation fisherman and plant manager that’s well connected around the whole east coast.

“I’ve taken a year off (from cooking), just to market the chowder. So I now work for this gentleman,” he explains, noting that this is first time in 19 years that he has been away from restaurant cooking.

Working for Mikey Rose Seafood’s, Greg is now marketing the 450-gram bags of chowder from Rose’s mobile retail seafood market…in essence from the back of a truck with a large variety of stops from tip to tip on the Island. The mobile seafood market, offers a custom box, well insulated where, Greg says, “Everything is fresh and clean.”

“Because of Mickey’s reputation for fresh fish, when people see that truck they know what’s there…it’s very common to
have a half a dozen people pull up as soon as our truck stops.”

The 450-gram bags offers two eight-ounce servings of chowder that was formulated to be thick. “People like thick chowder,” explains Aitken, adding a stipulation in the directions explains that if you don’t like it thick you can add a half a cup of milk and you get two 10 ounce bowls. The large two-kilo bag will serve nine people or add milk and serve 14 people.

Through their market research the mother and son team saw that a lot of chowder is canned or in concentrated form and runs about 10 per cent seafood. “Our is 36 per cent seafood and easy to prepare. Just thaw and heat it in a bowl or throw the boilable bag into a pot of boiling water,” he says.

As for his truck driving experiences this year, he notes, “Working with Mickey takes me from one end of the Island to the other with designated stops. If there is any questions, I can answer them from a restaurant chefs perspective.”

Aitken says Rose is looking at expanding into New Brunswick with his seafood markets, and that would be another market for the chowder. Currently, Greg’s brother Norman, who is also a chef, is serving the Island seafood chowder at Juniper Kitchen and Wine Bar in Ottawa. It is also sold in a local retail food mart in Charlottetown, bestofpei Market.

“It’s a high end chowder and a lot of high end restaurants serve it. It’s their clientele – tourists from Quebec and Ontario – that we are now targeting,” says Aitkens.