New Brunswick’s first family of fish builds Cooke Inc.
Andrew Willis Published 14 hours ago Updated 10 hours ago
Add the Cooke clan from the village of Blacks Harbour to the Irvings and McCains on the list of New Brunswick entrepreneurs who have built global companies, while keeping it all in the family.
In November, Cooke Inc. burnished its credentials as the largest family-owned aquaculture company in the world by acquiring Lima, Peru-based fishmeal producer Corporación Pesquera Inca SAC, known as Copeinca.
The Copeinca purchase – which cost a reported $1-billion – follows on Cooke’s $650-million takeover of Houston-based fish-oil producer Omega Protein Corp. in 2017 and its $1.5-billion acquisition of Australian salmon and shrimp farmer Tassal Group Ltd. two years ago.
Cooke’s roots go back 40 years, when co-founder and chief executive officer Glenn Cooke, his brother and his father launched a salmon farm in Blacks Harbour with wooden tanks and 5,000 fish. The salmon business is the largest division and still run out of the coastal village, with a population of 900. The head office is now in Saint John. Cooke has 15,000 employees in 15 countries, including 3,000 in Atlantic Canada, and $4-billion in annual revenue.
Where most aquaculture companies stay focused on one sector – farming fish, processing seafood or distribution – Mr. Cooke said his team decided to take a page from the Irvings, who created a vertically integrated forest product empire by owning forests, sawmills, pulp and paper plants and the maker of Royale brand tissues.
“As a family, we have all our eggs in one basket,” Mr. Cooke said in an interview in December. “Diversifying our business, by integrating operations and expanding into different regions, takes out some of the risks.”
To put more than just salmon on plates, Cooke acquired Spain’s largest sea bass and sea bream producer in 2011, a hake fishery in Argentina in 2016 and shrimp farmers in Honduras and Nicaragua in 2019. The company also built a seafood distribution network, made up of storage facilities and trucks.
The single biggest expense for fish farmers is food – feeding salmon, bream, hake and shrimp while they grow can account for 50 per cent of production costs. To control this expense, Cooke made a series of acquisitions to build a global food production division. The chief executive officer describes owning every part of the farming process as “a natural hedge against swings in the price of feedstocks, or fish.”
The unit includes Saskatoon-based Cooke subsidiary Bioriginal, which refines plant-based oils used to feed fish, people and pets. Cooke bought Bioriginal in 2017. Over the past two years, the division acquired food businesses in Colorado, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.
The Copeinca acquisition bulks up Cooke’s fish food operations. The company holds the rights to harvest 16 per cent of Peru’s annual quota of anchoveta, a type of anchovy well suited to production of the oils and meal used to feed larger fish, along with processing plants capable of handling 21 per cent of the country’s catch.
Historically, Cooke did two or three significant acquisitions each year, a pace the CEO plans to maintain. He said the company sees opportunities to grow its production facilities, to acquire fish harvest quotas at attractive valuations and to grow in regions such as Chile and Europe.
Part of Mr. Cooke’s hunger for further acquisitions comes from his view that aquaculture will be a key supplier of food for a planet facing the challenges of climate change. He questioned the federal government’s decision to shut down open-net salmon farms in British Columbia, a choice Mr. Cooke said reflected political lobbying, rather than science.
“Ocean farming is the most sustainable source of protein,” Mr. Cooke said. “We grow the healthiest product on your plate.
Mr. Cooke’s philosophy is that getting larger, by pouring retained earnings back into the business, makes his company more stable and better able to invest in technology, while putting money back into the communities where it operates.
“Public companies are driven by the next quarter’s results. As a private company, we think about results in terms of years,” Mr. Cooke said. While the business “can never say never” to going public or taking on outside partners, he said, “we are very happy being a private company.”
While Cooke may be family-owned, the CEO and his team track performance against publicly traded peers, including 26 salmon-farming companies listed on the Oslo stock exchange in Norway, and a handful of salmon farms traded on the Santiago exchange in Chile.
Mr. Cooke said he drew inspiration from the Irvings’ and McCains’ approach to doing business, yet he laughed at the suggestion that there is something special about the success of family companies in New Brunswick.
“Maybe there’s something special about breathing clean salt air every day,” he joked. He said that like the province’s other successful family businesses, Cooke goes out of its way to back other entrepreneurs in Atlantic Canada as a way to build the region’s relatively slow-growth economy.
In 2022, for example, Mr. Cooke invested in one of New Brunswick’s oldest family companies, Ganong Bros. Ltd., a chocolate business founded in 1873. Ganong is based in the town of St. Stephen, 30 minutes down the highway from Blacks Harbour.
When the candy maker announced the partnership, chief executive officer Bryana Ganong said: “We are pleased to partner with the Cooke family because they understand what it takes to run a globally competitive business from a base in New Brunswick.”