Ipswich Shellfish keeps it fresh

By TONIA NOELL MOLINSKI

Essex County Newspapers

IPSWICH _ Ipswich clams are famous but the man who made them famous studiously avoids publicity.

George Pappas, CEO and owner of the Ipswich Shellfish Company is a self-made man, a high school graduate who reads the ancient Greek philosphers _ in ancient Greek.

A few months ago , Pappas handed a waitress his credit card. She took it glanced at the name on the card and said, "Oh _ I've seen those trucks!"

The signature cream and blue Ipswich Shellfish delivery trucks with their trademark logos are a common sight up and down the east coast.

"We've grown up together," said Marie Christine Sullivan, vice president of the Back Bay Restaurant Group, which has five restaurants in Boston and a half a dozen more around New England. "We deal with a number of seafood suppliers, but they're the best by far _ they never cease to excite us."

Ipswich Shellfish Company is the largest fresh seafood supplier in the nation, it ships hundreds of thousands of pounds of lobsters, clams and fish around the world _ and it is still a family business.

"They're amazing. They're constantly searching for new species and they have developed the ability to deliver absolutely fresh product to our back door," a service that is essential to their business, said Sullivan, because none of the group's restaurants serve previously frozen seafood.

Sullivan credits George Pappas for taking a passionate interest in his customers as well as his product _ a passion Sullivan says is shared by everyone at Ipswich Shellfish.

"It's such a rare thing to have this kind of harmony with so much family in the business," said Chrissi Pappas, president of the Ipswich Shellfish Seafood Market as she gathered up papers in her office and strolled down the corridor for a conference with husband, George Pappas, and son Alexander, Ipswich Shellfish Group's general manager.

Chrissi Pappas is founder and president of the company's newest and fastest growing division division, the Ipswich Shellfish Fish Market _ a gourmet store with a direct mail catalogue division that caters to upscale clienele in search of hand selected seafood delicacies sold fresh or prepared at the Ipswich store, catered locally and shipped fresh overnight worldwide.

Together the Pappas family oversees a 400-employee, multimillion dollar empire that started in 1935 with two young men who knew how to dig clams and drove around in a beat-up old Ford runabout.

George Pappas is a man with good-humored eyes and a solid handshake. He recalled the freedom of doing business 60 years ago.

"They didn't have any regulations in those days. We used to shuck clams in little shacks and sell them out of our car in open buckets."

In fact it was shortly before World War II that Pappas, who had been working as a clammer after graduating from high school, noticed something.

"I saw the seeding clams were getting so thick - I could see they were going to be really plentiful, and there was a shortage then," he recalled. "I decided I should try selling them as well as digging them."

There is a photograph of him taken that year that shows a handsome young man with his foot on the running board of what is obviously a trophy car - the portrait of a young man aiming at a future rich with success. The car was just a car parked near the beach that the young men used a prop for their photograph _ the rusty car Pappas came in had a ripped top _ but the portrait soon became a reality.

"This was about three years after high school - and the guy that took that picture, Joe Sikora, and me started the company," said George Pappas.

Sikora left after the first year, but Pappas moved on - and up. He had the foresight to buy one the first refrigerated trucks to carry fresh fish and clams to his customers in 1937.

"It was a huge attraction. Wherever we parked people would come up and look and ask questions. It was the best advertisement I could have had." Pappas recalled. "I used to drive up to the restaurant without an order and just open the door of the truck and show the cook what I had - that's how I got the business," said Pappas.

"The big thing is we established very close relationships with our customers that way. We've had some of them for over 50 years - that's three generations," Pappas said.

This focus on personally knowing each customer is a company-wide mandate, said Chrissie, and is taken very seriously at every level within the company.

It wasn't long before Pappas introduced his famous "Ipswich Clam" a small, uniform clam with an exquisite flavor. His early ads in trade magazines promised "The Ipswich clam will make your business a success!" even touting Ipswich clams as a way to "improve your profits with our recipes!"

It was a claim that proved to be true.

Clams were suddenly plentiful. A bucket of fried clams at a restaurant might cost 80 cents, but it could feed a whole family, and suddenly Ipswich Shellfish Company was a player in the game of supply and demand.

This didn't escape the notice of Howard Johnson whose restaurant franchise was skyrocketing at the time.

"Boys," Pappas recalls Johnson saying, "give it [the clams] to me at cost and I will make you people."

"Why would I do that? Why would I give my clams away," said Pappas, who turned Howard Johnson down.

It was a decision that might have been the end of any other company, because Johnson found other suppliers willing to do just that. He bought from a chain of clammers willing to sell at low prices _ and the clam wars were on.

"It was a blessing in disguise," said Pappas, "maybe it was timing, but in the end the clammers selling to him were hurting and ours were doing well _ because you know, we paid them a fair price."

In a short time Pappas was employing 70 shuckers and buying from 70 clammers. The business expanded first from the Ipswich area around the North Shore, then down to Boston, Quincy and Randolph.

The routes became so long and so complex that by the 1950's one truck covered 62 stops. Pappas remembers being along in the truck one day and asking the driver, "aren't we going to stop for lunch?"

"There's no time," was the answer he got.

Pappas credits the success of Ipswich Shellfish Company to just this kind of dedication by his workers. Others credit the success of the company to Pappas' quiet but firm hold on the principle of fairness.

That principle, says Chrissie, holds that if your workers are dedicated you honor their dedication by paying them well _ and by always listening to what they have to say.

Today clam shacks are long gone. Clams are shucked, washed and packed in spotless, well-ventilated, temperature-controlled rooms on immaculate stainless steel tables by Cambodians who arrive by the busload every morning _ because the only Americans willing to do this job are the few who have been doing it for the last 65 years.

"The Cambodians are wonderful workers," said George Pappas, who credits them with inventing a faster way to shuck clams. "They hold them a little differently than we do - and this seems to help them shuck a little faster."

George Pappas is a self-made man who understands the meaning of work ethic and dedication _ man of deeply rooted values who treasures his family and every one of his employees.

"I always felt I needed them more than they needed me," he said referring not only to his current employees but to all of the generations of diggers, shuckers, truck drivers and staff that have worked for him over the last 65 years.

"They all know they can come to us anytime _ with any problem," said Chrissi as a staff member quickly stuck his head in the door with a suggestion about switching the direction of a freezer door to make it more accessible.

Chrissi listened, nodded. They wrestled briefly with the thought of possible unintended consequences to the flow of in-coming product on stainless steel carts, solved it and moved on.

"This is a real team," she said. "Everyone here contributes. We ask everyone their opinion on a new idea _ even old ones. We say, if there is a better way to do this just tell us _ and they do because they know we listen. It doesn't matter whether you sweep the floor, shuck the clams, drive the truck or pay the bills _ what you think counts with us. They know that."

George Pappas recognized the worth of his employees with more than words and gold watches. In a far-sighted move he instituted an employee profit-sharing plan in the early 1960's _ long before it was fashionable.

And every Thanksgiving the turkey on the table at the home of every employee is a gift from the Pappas family.

Today, with employers desperate for employees, that may not sound unusual _ what is unusual is that this is the way Ipswich Shellfish Company has been treating all of its employees since 1935.

Pappas still has the first secretary he ever hired, Connie Favalora.

Favalora's mother, supervisor in the shucking shack, brought Connie in and taught her how to shuck clams when she was seven years old. "She was like a mother to all the shuckers" recalls Favalora, "she would help them with all their problems."

Pappas credits Favalora with watching over the company's books with fierce energy and loyalty.

"We ran a very tight ship," said Pappas, "and she had to reconcile all the discrepancies."

Favalora was famous for her ability to stand up to the truck drivers who were responsible for handing in the sales slips and payments at the end of each route around the North Shore.

"I used to fight with all the drivers because they wouldn't bring me the right information," Favalora recalled.

"And she was just about the only one who could get it out of them," added George Pappas.

Favalora's office is still right next to the CEO. She has been "in the office" for 54 years and even now "the accountants all really respect her," added Chrissi, "she knows everything."

Favalora has personally seen each step in modern technology unfold. After keeping the books by hand for years - adding and re-adding long columns of figures in her head _ Favalora asked for one of those "fancy new adding machines" when they first came out in the 1950's.

The business manager turned her down, Favalora recalled saying, "it's good for you to add in your head."

Eventually Favalora did get her adding machine, and she recalls the first "computer": an ungainly thing from IBM that sorted cards and filled half of a room.

Technology has had a limited impact on the seafood business. Although there are fish cutting machines, said Alexander Pappas, fish are still best cut by hand, and the shucking of clams may never be automated.

However, there is a new storage tank that holds 100,000 pounds of lobster. "We sometimes ship as many as 50,000 pounds a day," said Kevin O'Donnell, administrative director of the lobster division.

The tank is full of carefully balanced seawater. Air percolates through the tank with the soothing sound of bubbles racing though water and bursting at the surface.

"When lobsters arrive here, they're stressed. We call this the lobster spa - you need to rejuvenate them before they ship out," said O'Donnell.

The effects of technology are in order processing and distribution. Today telephone sales and computerized inventory connect the five company profit centers of the Ipswich Shellfish Group: Ipswich Shellfish; the parent company; Maine Shellfish, in Belfast; United Shellfish in Connecticut; and a distribution center south of Boston that houses a thousand different products.

Technology certainly helped spawn the Ipswich Shellfish Fish Market. The unique products available in this cozy, gleaming gourmet market appealed to a group of visiting Italian retaurant executives.

"We should have this in Italy," they marveled.

The market was Chrissi's idea and she started small - out of the company cafeteria - letting word-of-mouth bring in the customers. "I thought I would make a mistake and it would kill me," she said.

Instead, after two successful years, Chrissi has expanded into the catalogue business - and suddenly her gourmet fish market is growing at a rate of 40 percent a year.