As this year's lobster season winds down, marine resources officials say the catch is likely to rival the 124 million pounds hauled in 2014.
A lot has changed since 2012, when an early-season surge of soft shell lobsters in Maine and a strong catch in Canada overwhelmed major processors and drove boat prices here below $2 a pound in some cases.
Events that summer moved dealers to add infrastructure to handle more product and the state to develop a new multimillion-dollar marketing strategy.
When the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative began its work more than a year ago, it immediately hired global message shaper Weber Shandwick. Working together, the PR firm and the marketing collaborative moved quickly.
Shedders, or soft-shell lobsters, were rebranded as "new shells," with a strong emphasis on their sweet, succulent, briny taste. The collaborative also commissioned a survey of thousands of upscale restaurants across the country.
"And what we found was, we weren't on the menu nearly as much as we'd hoped," says Matt Jacobson, the collaborative's executive director.
Especially on the East Coast. Jacobson says of 2,200 upscale restaurants surveyed between Maine and Baltimore, just 4 percent had Maine lobster on the menu.
"Only 17 percent of those had any kind of lobster on the menu," he says. "So at once, it was really disappointing not to see us menued more, but also a huge opportunity for us."
Jacobson and his colleagues took a trip to New York City over the summer, where they met with food journalists and a handful of top chefs. They conducted blind taste tests, with hard- and soft-shell lobster side by side.
Two of the chefs liked the rebranded new shell product so much that they ordered some right on the spot. A trip to Chicago, though, offered a more realistic view of the challenge of getting Maine lobster onto more menus.
Jacobson went to see and old friend, a chef, who runs two popular Mexican restaurants.
"I went in to see him," Jacobson says. "He said, 'You're in Maine, what are you doing?' I told him I was running the Maine lobster marketing effort. And he said, 'I've never used lobster. Do you think you could send me some? I'll try in in my recipes.'"
Jacobson sent him some.
"And he called us back and said, 'It came alive. What do I do with it?'" Jacobson says. "This guy is a prominent, accomplished chef. He has a show on Univision in Chicago."
"Many cooks have not been trained or steeped in the traditions of butchery, using whole fish, using whole animals," says Barton Seaver, a chef who lives in Freeport. "In some ways, a live lobster can be intimidating."
But he says there's an even bigger challenge facing the marketing collaborative as it tries to get lobster onto more menus.
Seaver runs the Healthy and Sustainable Food Program at the Harvard School of Public Health. He says not enough chefs see lobster as a dynamic ingredient.
"In truth, it is," he says. "The meat, extracted from the shells, butter-poached and then put on top of braised vegetables. And then the broth and the stock and all that delightful, delicious liquor — the brine of the sea that comes from the new shell lobsters used in a vinaigrette. Once you flip that switch in a chef's mind, look out."
The Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative will spend nearly $6 million between now and 2018, in part, on an effort to flip lots of those switches. In the coming years, the group will gradually expand its restaurant outreach to other major cities across the country.
The money financing the collaborative, which was created by the Legislature, comes from fees on the annual licenses purchased by lobster fishermen, dealers and processors. Annie Tselikis says it may be difficult, at least initially, for industry players to measure the return on their investment.
"There isn't a really easy way for us to correlate that marketing with sales," she says.
Tselikis, who runs the Lobster Dealers Association, is a member of the marketing collaborative's board.
"It's all proprietary information," she says. "And there isn't one aggregate that would be able to identify what those sales are."
Still, Tselikis says the board is committed to coming up with some kind of way of measuring the effect of the state's marketing efforts. Until it does, though, the collaborative will be left to rely on anecdotal evidence.
Emily Lane thinks her company is already seeing some payoff from the new shell rebranding effort. Lane runs marketing for Calender Islands Maine Lobster, which ships whole, cooked, frozen lobster across the globe.
"In the past, a lot of customers really haven't known the difference between a lobster from Maine and a lobster from other areas of this country and Canada," she says.
Slowly but surely, though, Lane says restaurants and retail customers who call Calender Islands to place orders are asking specifically for Maine lobster.