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America’s Seafood Leaders
IT’S CHALLENGING TO REMEMBER a time when Virginia — the nation’s third-largest seafood-producing state — wasn’t known for its flavorful, briny oysters and succulent clams, but the late 1990s and early 2000s were a dark era for shellfish producers.
Oysters, in particular, thanks to warming temperatures in the Chesapeake Bay, were dying off from diseases and a lack of solutions to treat them. Many oystermen — including third- and fourth-generation family businesses — closed their doors.
“It was a pretty desperate time. [We worried that] we were going to lose the Chesapeake Bay oyster industry because of disease,” said Bruce Vogt, president of Gloucester County-based Vogt Oyster Company (doing business as Big Island Aquaculture Oysters), which has been farming oysters for around 10 years.
That started to change in the early 2000s, when Dr. Stan Allen took over as director of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s (VIMS) Aquaculture Genetics and Breeding Technology Center and began genetically breeding oysters that would survive.
When Allen effectively produced diseaseresistant oysters around 2003, oyster hatcheries realized a resurgence. In 2005, when VIMS released its first survey of
shellfish aquaculture production, the state produced around 800,000 individual half-shell oysters. That number has quickly grown over the years, reaching 40 million oysters worth an estimated $62.4 million in 2018. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2018 Census of Aquaculture, one in every five American oysters sold in 2018 was harvested in Virginia.
Virginia’s 134 oyster farms made up 70% of all aquaculture operations in the Commonwealth in 2018, according to the
same 2018 aquaculture census. Virginia is the top producer of hard clams in the U.S., producing around 200 million individual clams each year. All told, Virginia boasts 152 mollusk farms, nearly double the 80 in the Commonwealth in 2013 and trailing only Massachusetts’ 157. The Commonwealth’s $94.3 million in 2018 mollusk sales nearly tripled those in California, the second-highest state.
And it’s not just shellfish that the state is known for. A variety of finfish such as striped bass and flounder also proliferate. Virginia is the nation’s third-largest seafood producer, with total landings of 363 million pounds in 2018, outpaced only by Alaska and Louisiana. Sales of food fish in Virginia reached $15.4 million in 2018, up 35% over a five-year period.
The Port of Reedville on the Northern Neck was the fifth-largest port in the U.S. by volume of seafood landed in 2018. Meanwhile, the Seafood Industrial Park in Newport News has averaged in the top 10 nationally for
Tangier Island Oyster Co., Tangier
2018 U.S. DOMESTIC SEAFOOD LANDINGS (POUNDS)
5.4B
1B
LOUISIANA ALASKA
363M
VIRGINIA
320M
313M
MISSISSIPPI OREGON
Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Fisheries of the United States,” 2018 Note: Data does not include seafood processed at sea.
value of seafood landed out of all seafood industrial parks. The massive park, home to a number of seafood and other water-dependent companies such as ice plants and boat-building businesses, provides full-service accommodations to the seafood industry, such as utility hook-ups and vessel fueling, service, and repair.
The state’s seafood industry is flourishing, leaders say, because of its favorable regulatory policies, its strong research support, and, of course, “the largest estuaries in the U.S. to haul seafood from — the Chesapeake Bay and parts of the Atlantic Ocean,” said Mike Hutt, executive director of the Virginia Marine Products Board. of our oysters,” Hutt said, while Ryan Croxton, owner of Rappahannock Oyster Co. in Middlesex County on the Middle Peninsula, says that most Asian customers prefer a sweeter oyster.
In addition, seafood sellers are effectively marketing their products within the state, across the United States and, in some cases, other countries. Virginia oyster producers are finding a lucrative market overseas, particularly in Europe and Southeast Asia. Asian consumers “love the flavor, texture, and affordability Oyster companies have raised the value of their product over the years by branding their specific oysters and distinct flavor. “Now you see oysters that don’t say, ‘from the Chesapeake Bay.’ They market individual oysters,” said Michael Oesterling, executive director of Shellfish Growers of Virginia.
Pleasure House Oysters, Virginia Beach
For example, Vogt’s website touts the fact that its master farmer, Daniel Vogt, pampers his “babies” with music and tumbling to “encourage deep cup growth for a meaty, juicy oyster.”
Virginia’s oyster industry has benefitted from Americans’ desire for raw oysters, which has surged in the past few years as consumers seek out one-of-a-kind food experiences. “Today, when you look at social media, you see people doing flights of oysters with different flavor profiles,” Hutt said.
Croxton has realized Americans’ growing desire to taste flavorful local oysters firsthand. The third-generation company ships its Rappahannock River oysters all over Virginia and the U.S., and to some foreign countries.
In 2011, the company opened Merroir, the first of its six restaurants and oyster bars in Virginia, Washington, D.C., Charleston, S.C., and Los Angeles. It moves around 10 million half-shell oysters annually.
“We have seen tremendous growth in the U.S. The market is nowhere near its peak,” Croxton said. “We eat so much more seafood than we used to per capita.” In fact, U.S. per capita seafood consumption hit the 16-pound mark for the first time in nearly a decade in 2017, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “2018 Fisheries of the United States” report.
Oyster producers have worked hard for their current success, knocking on the doors of restaurants and attending food service and retail trade shows. Croxton attributes the growth to “grassroots efforts, farmers, and chefs preaching this gospel of a highly efficient form of aquaculture.”
“It is very unlike a lot of aquaculture. It’s not just ‘Do no harm,’ it’s also ‘Do good.’ That message resonates with chefs and with people who are getting into it,” Croxton said.
Deborah Pratt, of Middlesex County on the Middle Peninsula, has won the National Oyster Shucking Championship Contest 11 times. Pratt — known as the Black Pearl — and her sister, Clementine Macon, have made a collective 18 appearances in the World Oyster Opening Championship in Galway, Ireland.
Beyond One-SizeFits-All College Dreams
James Rosenbaum is a professor of human development, social policy, and sociology at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. He specializes in research on work, education, and housing opportunities. His books include “Bridging the Gaps: College Pathways to Career Success” and “After Admission: From College Access to College Success.” VEDP President and CEO Stephen Moret sat down with him to discuss how the traditional college model fails some students and what can be done to make it work better. A Conversation With James Rosenbaum
Stephen Moret: You recently published a book with a couple of co-authors called “Bridging the Gaps: College Pathways to Career Success.” And in that book, you talk about three gaps: students taking courses without getting credits, students getting credits that didn’t count for credentials, and then getting credentials that don’t have payoffs in the labor market.
James Rosenbaum: The focus on gaps is important because we designed a higher education system for a certain group of students. We all know what college is. It’s the experience that we had, and that is in a traditional college with traditional procedures. Fortunately, we have expanded opportunities for college now to nearly everybody. It is astounding to see in the cohort of students we studied. They were seniors in 2004, and we looked at what happened to them over the next eight years. Ninety percent of high school graduates go to college. They won’t go at once — the usual statistic is about two-thirds. But over the next few years, many more students realize, “I don’t have a chance unless I go to college,” and they change their mind. They raise their expectations, and they go to college. The problem is, college has not been well designed for many of these students, and that leads to the gaps that you just mentioned.
Moret: Particularly the non-traditional sort of cohorts.
Rosenbaum: That’s exactly right. We have students who are motivated to go to college, and they could benefit from certain kinds of college, but we give them a one-size-fits-all model, and that doesn’t work very well for many students. And so we end up with students basically facing each of those gaps. Some of the gaps are of our own construction, where we have created a system which looked fine by our traditional criteria, but when matched against the new students, it doesn’t work. And so, in essence, what’s useful about this perception about gaps is: We created them, we can un-create them, and we can actually see the ways to address the problems that we face. And here, the problems are very serious. Community college is wonderful. It creates open access at very low cost and meets labor market demands. But community colleges have very poor rates of completion of any credential. And if you don’t complete a credential, you don’t get a payoff, and so we need to be able to rethink what we are doing here. What kind of college is going to be beneficial to the new kinds of students? There’s a lot that can be beneficial, and it turns out it’s worth more than we thought — what we call subbaccalaureate credentials: certificates and associate degrees. They have lower average earnings, and that’s well known. What’s not known is, the overlap of earnings with B.A.’s is enormously strong. The top 25% of people with a one-year certificate earn more than most B.A.’s earn — and on the other end, a very comparable figure, the bottom 25% of B.A.’s earn less than most certificate holders earn. And the findings are even stronger for associate degrees.
Moret: There are some reasons why these gaps occur. I suppose a lot of it, as you mentioned, is that we’ve focused on these traditional college students, and have perhaps not redesigned the system, or at least created pathways in the system sufficient to support those non-traditional students. But why do you think it’s taking so long for the United States to be able to shift toward a model that would better serve the broad array of students that higher education serves in this country?
Rosenbaum: I think one of the ironic features of the American system is: We are very idealistic, and we’re accomplishing a lot of our ideals. And so when I say 90% of high school graduates are going to college, think about your high school class and the diversity of interests and the diversity of skills in that. We are succeeding beyond anything I thought was possible in terms of getting people into college, and that’s a success that creates its own problems. And so part of our problem is just that. The other part is — and this is not a good thing — we often blame students for their failures, and often the deck is stacked against them. We need to do a better job of understanding: To what extent are we putting people in a situation where they can’t win? And to what extent are there other options that are not usually thought of where they can win?
I think we’ve got some of the pieces in place, but we don’t have the advice in place. We don’t have the advising procedure in place. We totally skimp on investing in counselors and advisors and giving them the information they need to give good advice.
Moret: You mentioned the issue with counselors. As I look at the research that’s been done about higher education and the labor market, one of the most common broadly shared recommendations to make the system work better is to improve the availability and the quality of advising and coaching, both in K-12 and in college, and yet we don’t seem to be making much progress in that direction. There’s some evidence that quite a bit of institutions are actually going the other direction. What has to happen to make some real progress in that area?
Rosenbaum: Well, there’s one thing that is well-known, and it’s very much true: The student caseload for counselors is abysmal. In high schools, it’s not good — 300 students to one counselor. In community colleges, it’s horrid — 1,000 students to one counselor. And that’s a low-ball number. There are many cases I know of 2,000, 3,000, or more. We do not have a counseling system in the community colleges, basically.
But the other piece is something we can do without very much cost. And that is: Devise systematic advice that we can give to students about what their options are, the advantages of those options, who they work particularly well for, and who they don’t work for, giving realistic advice in a systematic way. And here the kind of thing that researchers do, I think, can be very helpful, because researchers look at what actually happens. They don’t just look at what
T R A D I T I O N A L C O L L E G E P R O C E D U R E S V E R S U S NONTRADITIONAL PROCEDURES USED BY OCCUPATIONAL COLLEGES
TRADITIONAL PROCEDURES...
Defer payoffs
Set up early obstacles (remedial courses)
Are unnecesarily complex
Leave students uninformed as they make course choices
Encourage self-directed job search
Leave students uninformed as they make job choices NONTRADITIONAL PROCEDURES...
Lead to quick payoffs
Enable incremental success that delays obstacles
Offer “package deal” pathways and preset time slots for courses
Provide “guard rails” to help students make informed course choices
Provide college-directed job choice and job search
Provide job placement services to guide job choices and assist students with access to jobs
Source: James E. Rosenbaum, Caitlin E. Ahearn, and Janet E. Rosenbaum, “Bridging the Gaps: College Pathways to Career Success,” 2017
the goals are — they look at what actual outcomes are.
Moret: You also talk about something where there’s a lot of economies of scale with having just the information base. You could almost imagine a technology solution there. Who has gotten closest to creating something like this that’s accessible to prospective college students?
Rosenbaum: Part of it is software. Naviance’s software and other brands of college readiness software are often very useful for advising students about which colleges to apply to. And that kind of matching of students’ background achievement, programs of study, interests, geographical preferences, can be inputted into the software, and advice can be given. Unfortunately, that doesn’t go far enough, and we really need to be developing software, and actually even sheets of paper, that would guide counselors to respond to students whose achievement is much below the usual average traditional college entrance achievement. And the alternative interests — the love of doing technical things, working with electronics, working with mechanical things — these kinds of alternatives aren’t in the software that I know of, and yet they’re important for people’s choices.
We’ve gotten to a place where we’re admitting students, new kinds of students, and we haven’t gotten to the place where we can tell them where they can benefit, and where they can actually have their own interests and own abilities recognized.
Moret: The data sets that are currently available often talk about, “Well, here’s all the jobs and what they pay, and what the required education is,” let’s say, but there’s not enough of a sense of how you navigate from where you are today to these outcomes.
Rosenbaum: It’s absolutely a missing link, and it is a crucial link. Students want advice about these things. They want someone who knows them even a little bit, who can make a judgment about what’s an appropriate set of goals, what are alternative goals, and to work that through. And so students need that kind of advice. The Bureau of Labor Statistics book — I don’t know if it’s still down on paper, but when it was down on paper, it was four inches thick of listing just jobs and aspects of jobs. And it’s overwhelming in a way that students can’t possibly cope with. We need to find ways to target more clearly and make those targets consistent with the local labor market.
Moret: I don’t know if you saw there was a recent piece that essentially made the case for a new learning ecosystem. And one of the key features of that, they called navigation. And it was this whole idea about helping individuals to assess where they are today, to understand the options available to them, and the different pathways to get there. And I certainly agree with you — the opportunity for a technology-enabled solution seems like a big part of it.
Rosenbaum: One of the counterparts of this is the college system, where we offer an overwhelming number of options for students to take without very much guidance. The gaps that you were
mentioning earlier, many of them come from students making suboptimal choices that they couldn’t anticipate.
One of the recommendations that I’ve made in the past, and it’s now being adopted quite generally, is creating guided pathways. And these pathways are sought among the thousands of courses you can take, and say, “If you want this goal, here are the things you should do to achieve it. And this is when you should take this course. Taking them out of sequence often doesn’t work, and doesn’t give you credit, and leads to failure.” So regimenting the curriculum in a way that makes it clear: You choose your goal, ideally with some help from a counselor or advisor, and then the college will provide all of the steps in the right order that you need to get there.
Moret: In your most recent book, you talk a bit about the College Scorecard, and perhaps some benefits of it, but also some shortcomings of it. I don’t know if
you’ve had a chance to peruse the new version, but in the last few months, a new version has come out. I’d be curious about what you see as the benefits of how it’s evolved, but also, could you elaborate a little bit on what you think could be done to improve it?
One of the things, for example, you talked about — earnings is certainly one relevant outcome, but there’s also non-monetary benefits of education and work that perhaps could be incorporated in some way.
Rosenbaum: The College Scorecard looks at easily measured features, and that comes out to getting a job, maybe getting a job in the right area, and earnings. And there’s much more that is important, especially in the early career. When you first start, we’ll often think, “Well, you want to get better earnings.” Turns out that’s often the wrong answer, that it’s better to choose to consider the tradeoff between earnings and getting training — get experiences that are going to be valued. Students complain sometimes that the college aims them at lower earnings than they could get on their own. But the jobs they find on their own don’t give them relevant job experience and are going to be a dead end for their career.
College staff often actually know what are the good training experiences students could get in their first jobs that are going to lead to a much more successful career later. Aiming too much for high earnings in that first job can be a problem. I think the Scorecard is well-intentioned, and to some degree, can be used cautiously. But it’s not the whole story, and if followed too rigorously, particularly with high-stakes punishments, it could do damage.
Moret: As you rightly pointed out, there’s a huge distribution in the employment outcomes that individuals have. One of the areas of study that I think is getting a little bit more attention lately is the underemployment problem. We have historically low unemployment,
JAMES ROSENBAUM Professor of Human Development, Social Policy, and Sociology, Northwestern University
but underemployment, even of bachelor’s grads, is quite material in the U.S. Some estimates are order of magnitude, 30% or so, of full-time employed adults in the U.S. with a bachelor’s degree or higher not working in a college-level occupation.
What do you think about the research in that area right now, and is there anything that you’ve gleaned about what you think could be done to kind of improve on that situation?
Rosenbaum: It’s a great question and very important. We have looked at the B.A. degree as offering a good education, but also, it’s offering high status. And we do that based on averages as if everybody was at an average. And there’s wide variation within the earnings of B.A.’s and in the earnings of other degrees as well, and it turns out that there’s an enormous overlap between these. So if we were just going on earnings, we would come to the conclusion that, mostly, it’s a big overlap. And students who choose a B.A. are often not going to have higher earnings than someone with an associate degree, even though they’re spending many more years getting it.
And usually, if you take longer than four years to get your B.A., those last years are ones that you didn’t expect to have to be paying for. So there are a lot of problems with a B.A. that we are not very candid about, and as a result, students are caught shorthanded with not enough money, and not enough time, and promises they made to family, and promises they made to employers about how many years college would constrain their hours.
The underemployment also relates to field of study. Students with a B.A. come from various majors, and those majors change the outcomes enormously. And so, a major in a STEM field, everybody knows there’s great value in that. The average monetary value of a bachelor’s degree in English, or a bachelor’s degree in some other liberal arts field, may not be as great. And this question of variation turns out to be especially important, actually, here. But more important than earnings is: What’s the future trajectory, and to what extent are students going to be getting a good career that’s going to have a future? And students often don’t understand that, and advisors are not very good about telling them, “It is crucial that you make a decision of getting a job that’s going to have a future for you.”
Moret: It gets back to helping people think about the choices that they make, and how they impact a future economic opportunity, if you will. Some other countries do perhaps a better job at this than we do. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Rosenbaum: Well, Germany certainly comes to mind. Germany has a total belief that young people can do a lot of things that we think they can’t do. And in Steve Hamilton’s study of German apprenticeships, he found 18-year-olds
JAMES ROSENBAUM Professor of Human Development, Social Policy, and Sociology, Northwestern University
who are not college educated doing clerical-type jobs of considerable responsibility. And he said, “We don’t think 18-year-olds can do that kind of thing in this country.” And so we sell short the students, we sell short the experiences they get, we underutilize them, and we under-train them. And so the German apprenticeship experience is one that tells us we could be doing a lot more, and it does require investment. Partly from employers, perhaps from the government, but somebody needs to make these investments. Because without these initial investments, we basically lose a lot of capability that we could have otherwise.
In Japan, there is a strong linkage between work and high school, and graduating students are recommended for certain jobs based upon their hard work and achievements in high school.
Moret: In high school? Interesting.
Rosenbaum: And these were direct linkages, direct relationships, where a local employer would say, “Well, we’ll give you 20 slots. You nominate 20 people that you think are going to do a good job. Don’t recommend someone who’s not going to do a good job, because then we’ll not come back with job openings next year.”
Moret: Who’s doing the recommending?
Rosenbaum: The high school counselor evaluates the students based largely on their grades, and says, “These are the students we think will work hard and can do a good job.” But they won’t fill out their quota of 20 jobs with 20 people, if they don’t think they can handle it, because they don’t want to disappoint the employer.
Moret: Why don’t we do that in the U.S.?
Rosenbaum: I don’t know why we don’t do it. We come closer to doing it for college graduates, but we still don’t do it. It’s such a missing link, because workbound students don’t have incentives for getting good grades, employers don’t get valuable indicators of student work habits, and teachers give grades and ratings that students ignore and don’t work for. Instead, we create competition among students on artificial criteria that don’t matter. They compete on grades. They compete on number of activities. You see these really amazing résumés, but none of it tells us anything we want to know, what employers want to know, because they want to know about soft skills, they want to know about persistence, they want to know about attention to quality, they want to know about problem-solving. None of those are in the résumé. All of those are things that faculty could make recommendations about students, and we don’t have a trusted linkage between teachers and employers, so we can’t convey that information.
What’s needed is a trusted relationship where the school says, “We like having this kind of relationship. We will treat it seriously. We will give grades and candid recommendations,” and employers will get valuable information, will hire students who work hard, and will come back to us next year.
Moret: One of our great ambitions in Virginia is, we really aspire to be the state that is the best in the country at this topic. Essentially at the whole range of things we might put under the label of human capital development. And part of that is helping improve these connections, helping people to better navigate the opportunities available to them, and
to pursue those. You articulate some fabulous ideas, not only in your most recent book, but in some of your past writing. Some of those have already been implemented in some places, and others are promising, based on research today. Do you think colleges, states, and/or the federal government need to craft new structures to better enable these things to happen?
It seems to me there’s so many of these great ideas that just perhaps don’t have a champion to really make them happen. And I wonder if part of the answer is some kind of structural shift.
Rosenbaum: I think that’s exactly right. And that’s perhaps a weak point of the American system. We mistrust structure, we mistrust big government and big programs, and we love decentralization, we love individual initiative, and that’s not going to be enough. This is a big problem, and we have big things to do. One of the biggest is alignment. We have very poor alignment between K-8 and high school, between high school and college, between two-year colleges and four-year colleges, and then between colleges and work. Without alignment, we’re at cross purposes.
And so we have high school exit exams, a wonderful idea for measuring the accomplishments of students. Unfortunately, students will pass the high school exit exam, and three months later show up at a college where they fail the remedial placement exam. That’s poor interaction and alignment. And I wrote a piece recommending that we do alignment. Harper College in Illinois has actually done that.
Moret: Really?
Rosenbaum: The provost at Harper College, Judith Marwick, created an alignment system where the college remedial placement exam is given in 11th grade. All of a sudden, students got information about how prepared they are for college. And if students fail, that’s great, that doesn’t matter, because they’ve got a whole year to work on it. And that’s what they do. They devote senior year to remedying the problems that students have, and they’re easily identified by this procedure. This alignment means that many more students enter college ready to do college-level work.
It also says, “We’ve got this missed opportunity. We’ve got the high school trying to prepare students, we just don’t have the right standards and curriculum in place.” This kind of alignment does that. Now you can do the same story for the next leap. The alignment between community college and four-year college is very poor. Four-year colleges allow students to transfer in, and they make it very difficult to get to actually do that. And inevitably, students have taken many courses which don’t match the courses that the four-year college expects.
And even in the state of Illinois, where we have an articulation agreement, that only covers electives. It doesn’t cover the major. And so here we’ve got this act that was intended to make everything count, it doesn’t count for the major. General Ed may count, but your economics major, your economic courses, may not count at all. And it’s hard to anticipate that. At one four-year college, actually, the guy who is in charge of deciding which credits counted said his job was to give people the bad news that much of what they’ve got doesn’t count. And he said, “Maybe instead of that, I should be talking to entering community college students and telling them what they can take at that college that’s going to count at our college.” And so, basically, he’s turned his job into advising students that he didn’t even have yet. That kind of effort is rare. The misalignment we usually find is just inexcusable, and it’s easily fixed, but it is rarely fixed, and we need to do more to make that alignment work.
Moret: Was there anything else that you you wanted to share, that you think we should have touched on that perhaps we didn’t?
Rosenbaum: One thing that I am struck by is, we talk about the choice of degree as if it’s an either/or.
Moret: You need a B.A. or less than B.A. — is that what you mean?
Rosenbaum: Yes, B.A. or an associate degree, or a certificate. It’s not either/ or. You can do both/and. And I think we need more strategies where students will not just choose a goal, but they’ll choose how to get to that goal. They may choose a BA, but do it by first getting a certificate, then getting an associate degree, then getting the BA. It may take a little longer, but it provides payoffs all the way along.
Moret: Off-ramps at every stage, basically.
Rosenbaum: That’s right. Students who have high risk of college being interrupted, students who have high risk of finding the courses too difficult, will get something along the way, even if they don’t get all the way to the BA. And it means that they have payoffs right away. It means they have better earnings to support their college careers. It means that they’re getting a set of expertise that is valued from the very beginning. And we don’t do enough of that. It seems to me that incremental success is a great way to hedge your bets, and a great way to get payoffs, and to be able to leverage your job experiences with your training.
Moret: It’s a wonderful idea. I want to thank you so much for taking time to visit with us today, and especially for the really outstanding and important work that you’ve done and that you continue to do. We’ve benefited from it in Virginia, I’ve benefited from it in my own career, and I’m looking forward to staying in touch in the years ahead.
Rosenbaum: Thank you. I enjoyed it also, Stephen.
Virginia in Your Cup
Aconfluence of geographical, workforce, and other advantages has put Hampton Roads in a strong position in the caffeinated beverage industry. The region is home to a large tea processing and packaging plant, four coffee manufacturing facilities, and many support businesses in such areas as warehousing, machinery repair, and packaging supplies.
Over the years, the caffeine industry has grown into an economic engine in Hampton Roads and the City of Suffolk in particular. According to Harvard Business School data, Hampton Roads has the third-highest concentration of people employed in coffee and tea processing in the United States, trailing only Charlotte, N.C., and New York.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, coffee ranked seventh among products imported into Virginia from 2015–2018, with more than $1.1 billion worth of beans entering the Commonwealth. About a third of all green coffee imported into the United States comes into the Mid-Atlantic region (The Port of Virginia, Baltimore, Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S.C.).
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN The road to caffeine prominence began in 1955 when the Lipton Tea Company built a tea processing and packaging plant in Suffolk, now Lipton’s only processing plant in North America. That plant produces all Lipton tea bags sold in the United States. Lipton, which is owned by Unilever, invested $96 million to expand the plant in 2013.
Hills Bros. opened a manufacturing plant in Suffolk in 1986 that’s now owned by Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA, which also has a distribution center located in Portsmouth. The 355,000-sq.-ft. plant roasts enough beans daily for about 20 million cups of coffee and packages the ground or whole bean product into bags, cans, and single-serving cups.
In addition to Hills Bros., Massimo Zanetti’s lines of coffee include Chock full o’Nuts, Kauai Coffee, and Chase & Sanborn. The plant also produces coffee for about 30 private-label clients. In all, Massimo Zanetti produces hundreds of types of coffee from beans grown all over the world.
