Soup's In, Shucking's Out: Blount Retools Its Water Street Operation

WARREN — The steam-driven clam shucking machines are quiet, the enormous walk-in freezer, larger than many homes, all but empty. The workers, who at one time numbered more than 120, now total about a dozen.

Blount Fine Foods’ sprawling seafood processing plant, a fixture along Water Street for generations, is as quiet these days as it’s ever been. But big, bold new things that could reinvent the company, and Warren, are in the works.

#In August, president Todd Blount shut down the company’s clam shucking operations, which had once been a mainstay and staple of the business since his great, great, great grandfather started harvesting and dealing in oysters in the 1880s. Oysters and later, quahogs, built Blount into what it is today. But faced with shrinking margins, a change in consumer habits, and a slow but steady decline in the shucking operation’s profitability, Mr. Blount made the tough decision over the past 18 months to sell off the company’s shucking operation and re-invent the plant as a producer of clam chowder and other seafood-related products.

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