Tag Archives: Clearwater founder John Risley
The man who changed Canada’s lobster industry and his $1B deal to sell Clearwater
In Nova Scotia, John Risley is arguably a household name, synonymous with the seafood industry and his many conspicuous possessions. On both fronts, his reputation is well earned. In 1976, he and his brother-in-law Colin MacDonald started Clearwater, a dumpy retail lobster shop on the side of a suburban Halifax highway. From that simple start, Risley fundamentally changed the Atlantic Canadian lobster industry — transforming it from a seasonal, afterthought business to a year-round, $3-billion sector where lobsters are shipped overnight by air to customers in Europe and Asia, a premise unheard of before Risley entered the industry. Along the way, Clearwater matured into a global seafood company. >click to read< 07:43
How the $250M Clearwater Seafoods purchase by 7 Mi’kmaw First Nations came to be
“In the beginning, we wanted a pathway, a clear pathway on how we’d end up with 100 per cent of the ownership of the company,” said Chief Terry Paul of the Membertou First Nation. “Most all of the prospective partners walked away … because of our insistence on what we were looking for.” Paul made the comments during an online chat with Clearwater founder John Risley that was put on by the non-profit Public Policy Forum. >click to read< 09:42
