3 minute read
THE BUZZ
End of an era
Frostman Fish Market closed last month, marking the end of an era when people shopped at individual markets for groceries
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It was the middle of the afternoon when the phone
rang on the very last day of operations for Frostman Fish Market, long a presence at 108 S. Second Ave. in Wausau. It was Friday and a restaurant just north of Wausau needed a case of fish.
Guy Jr. Frostman cut short a newspaper interview, grabbed the box of fish and headed out to make the delivery. Reliable service and quality products have kept the business going for the family since 1947 and he wasn’t about to disappoint what would be the last customer.
He and his sister Sherry, co-owners of Frostman’s, sold the business to Merrill Distributing as of Aug. 27. Sherry, the older of the two, has retired and Guy Jr. is working for the new owners in sales.
The place is more than a storefront with some refrigerated storage space. It has a literal connection to the source of some of what has been sold there. The Frostmans’ grandparents, Uldrich and Ina Frostman, were fishing commercially on the Great Lakes when they decided to sell their boat and establish a place in Wausau for retail seafood sales and to act as a distributor to other businesses.
The family likes to note that the boat sold 74 years ago can still be seen. It’s in a museum in Cornucopia, a small village on the shores of Lake Superior in Bayfield County.
The succession of ownership went from Uldrich and Ina to their son Guy and daughter-in-law Lois in 1960. Business grew slowly over the years until Guy Jr. and Sherry bought it from their parents in 1990. Volume doubled in the next decade, necessitating a 1,700-square-foot expansion in 2000.
Most of that fish and shrimp goes out the back door rather than the front; wholesale to restaurants, fast food outlets, churches and bars rather than retail to individual walk-in customers. The split between wholesale and retail is lopsided, with 95% going out to businesses.
Sherry says over the years from when her grandparents established the business, that split went from its original of almost all retail to the current almost all wholesale. Those were the days, though, when shoppers went to the bakery for their bread, to the butcher for their meat and to the fish store for their seafood. Now it’s all at the supermarket.
Big sellers to fish customers are primarily cod and haddock. Friday night fish frys are big consumers of product and Sherry quips that it has been easier to list the local fish frys they do not supply rather than those they do. Pretty much every restaurant ranking high in the “best of” issue every year are Frostman’s customers.
For in-store sales, she says that over the years one of the most popular products has been their cooked shrimp with special sauce. They sold hundreds and hundreds of pounds of that cooked shrimp each year, all of it Gulf shrimp rather than imported.
She says it was mostly seasonal. “During the holidays, we’d have four burners going eight hours a day,” she says.
Those shrimp sales went both ways, she says, as the Frostmans enjoyed the visits from retail customers who had come in for years and years. “We really appreciate the families that included us in their holiday traditions,” she says. That cooked shrimp tradition is going to end, she says, and there are no plans to have that special food available elsewhere.
For most of the three decades they’ve owned the store, Guy and Sherry did everything themselves. That meant that, usually, the longest vacation either of them could manage would be a four-day weekend. Despite that, there was never brother-sister friction because they trusted each other to pull their own weight.
Other than filling in for a few weeks at a friend’s business, the fish market is the only place Sherry has worked since she was a teen. “It will be difficult at first to end all this,” she says, “but by merging with Merrill Distributing we are confident our end users are in the best hands possible as they share the same values that we were raised with.”
▲ Guy and Sherry Frostman said goodbye to Frostman Fish Market, a staple in Wausau for 74 years.
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