Hancock Gourmet Lobster Co. - Hancock Gourmet Lobster Co. Retail Product Line (Pot Pie, Corn Chowder, Mac & Cheese)

Though Cal Hancock began the Hancock Gourmet Lobster Company just over a decade ago, the company’s heritage goes back to the 1940s when her grandmother, Hazel Ellis Hancock, opened a restaurant in Ogunquit, Maine.

“I got started eating lobster before I was born,” Hancock jokes. “Customer service—though she wouldn’t have called it that—was very important to my grandmother. She also told me, ‘Never hide the taste of the lobster.’” That mantra has served the Hancock family well: the restaurant, now run by Cal’s cousins, is still serving Maine lobster, and Hancock Gourmet has now won its seventh, eighth and ninth sofi Awards this year.

It was Cal’s experience living in the Midwest that gave her the idea for Hancock Gourmet Lobster. “I learned people are intrigued by Maine and love lobster,” says Cal, who started her company offering mail-order products. “But the majority of people are not interested in getting lobster in the mail and killing it themselves.”

So she found a way to get Maine lobster to customers—by making it for them, using family recipes. The company that started in 2000 with one product (Cundy’s Harbor Lobster Stew) now has more than 40, sold in gourmet catalogs and specialty stores.

Hancock works out of Cundy’s Harbor, Maine’s oldest commercial lobstering community. She is active in protecting Holbrook’s Wharf, Cundy’s Harbor’s commercial fishing wharf, from private development and preserving the much-needed “working waterfront” for the next generation of lobster fishermen and women.—Deborah Moss

MSRP: Varied

website: hancockgourmetlobster.com

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