Our Story

A Note from our captains

Humble beginnings

Seafood is in our blood. Abe Stavis grew up in the shellfish business, delivering steamer clams before school in Revere and Quincy, Massachusetts.

Abe’s son, Mel Stavis, founded North Coast Seafoods in 1957 in Boston’s Long Wharf district.

When his original location burned to the ground, Mel picked up and moved across town to Fargo St., the site of today’s Boston Convention Center. Mel kept a photo of the inferno engulfing his first plant on his desk for the rest of his career.

Bringing the kids on board

Mel’s sons, Norm and Jim, had high aspirations for North Coast Seafoods, joining the family business in 1971 and 1975. As the business grew, they began to work closely with Rich Polins, their childhood friend and a fellow fish fanatic.

Together, they aspired to build a company focused foremost on quality, trust, and reliability, not just profit.

Integration and Reinvention

Mel retired in 1988 and passed the torch to Norm and Jim. Working tirelessly, often sleeping on their office desks and making early morning deliveries to customers themselves, the Stavis brothers reimagined North Coast as a vertically integrated first receiver, processor, and distributor, one with the scale and reach to get the best fish even when supply is tight.

Looking to expand, yet unwilling to compromise their standards, they sought to vertically integrate and thereby control every step of the supply chain from dock to plate. They purchased directly from the most reputable and dedicated fishermen and women, processed in their own custom-built facilities, and distributed to their valued customers with their own fleet of temperature-controlled trucks.

Developing relationships

As North Coast grew into one of the largest seafood companies in the Northeast, Norm, Jim, Rich, and the entire North Coast crew focused on keeping things personal.

North Coast distinguished itself as the big fish with a small fish attitude by cultivating deep, durable relationships with customers and suppliers.

By adding a dedicated shellfish house in Chatham on Cape Cod and a new state of the art facility in New Bedford, North Coast now had roots in three of New England’s most famous seafood cities - Boston, New Bedford, and Cape Cod.

oUR Home in Boston

In 2000, North Coast Seafoods moved into its state-of-the-art facility on Dry Dock Ave in the Boston Seaport District, our home to this day.

From an antibacterial ozonation system, to an in-house quality control laboratory, to a shellfish purification system, to a roof covered in solar panels, North Coast had done for its plant what it had already done for its people: invest in the very best.