From brass to bass: Prized Mediterranean fish raised in one-time Waterbury factory

In a former Waterbury factory where buttons and artillery were once made, prized Mediterranean sea bass flown in from France now swim in massive tanks, raised as food for delivery to upscale restaurants and supermarkets.

It’s a new direction in economic development for Connecticut’s one-time brass manufacturing center and a big stake in aquaculture for Eric Pedersen, chief executive officer of Ideal Fish, which grows and sells branzino, a European bass popular with consumers. The former Wall Street banker began looking for a site five years ago and “everything came together in Waterbury,” he said, citing its superior water, plentiful factory space and proximity to Interstate 84.

“We need high-quality manufacturing space,” he said. “We need high-quality water, power, wastewater treatment, natural gas delivered to our facilities and we need an administration supportive of job creation.”

Mayor Neil O’Leary was eager to help when Pedersen pitched his business.

“We gave him a great deal of enthusiastic support,” he said. “It’s something most of us in the city knew very little about until Eric gave a presentation.”

Public backing includes a five-year abatement on real property taxes and slicing 80 percent from the company’s $85,000 annual real estate tax bill. Since December 2015, more than $10 million, including financing from Pentair, a water filtration and aquaculture business, has been invested in the business, including $8 million in equipment, Pedersen said.

The Waterbury factory — now refurbished with 8,500-gallon tanks and other equipment — had been empty for two years after a military contractor that made mortar rounds lost its business and left. It was previously a button factory.

Even among aging factories being put to new use as apartments, art galleries, restaurants, offices and other purposes, an aquaculture business is unusual. With empty factories dotting Connecticut, a web of interstate highways and an expanding network of natural gas lines, “this could be an explosive industry in this state,” Pedersen said.

He’s no novice to fish farming. As head of mergers and acquisitions at Dillon, Read & Co., an investment bank that eventually became part of UBS Group after a few acquisitions, Pedersen focused on natural resources. The work exposed him to water and environmental issues, he said, leading him to become chief executive officer of a water filtration company.

He began raising fish in “small 800-gallon systems” in the basement of his Stamford home. “My wife initially was disturbed that I was doing this,” he said.

Pedersen has since moved on to raising thousands of branzino fish in tanks in the spotless 52-year-old factory in an industrial park. Ideal Fish is using 63,000 square feet,.

The city’s water is superior, he said, because it does not require chloramines, a disinfectant used to treat drinking water. And the location is good, too: “We’re in this enormous seafood market from Boston to Washington, D.C.,” he said.

In seven shipments a year, Pedersen imports 30,000 to 40,000 bass no more than a quarter-gram in size, from Montpelier, France, that are delivered to Boston Logan International Airport. His goal is to build a hatchery in Waterbury.

The fish are raised for a year to 13 months when they reach market size, then dispatched to ice water and the “chill kill” in which they die due to lack of oxygen. “They’ll be on ice next week,” Pedersen said, looking at a tank filled with grown fish set to be delivered by truck to customers.

Ideal Fish, which now employs six full-time and two part-time workers, is expected to to be in full production next year. Eventually, it will grow to employ between 60 and 70 workers, Pedersen said.

Branzino, the Italian name for European sea bass, is flaky, tender and silver-skinned, weighing from one to three pounds. It’s considered a high-end food, sold for $9 to $13 a pound, and eaten on the bone.

“As food it’s not an ultra-expensive fish to buy,” said Bruce Mattel, senior associate dean at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and a specialist in sustainable seafood. “But it has a perception of value. Bass in general have a higher perception of value.”

It’s not found in an “average supermarket,” he said.

Sending fish around the world as a commodity is “not an uncommon practice,” Mattel said, citing consumer demand in China and Japan for glass eels from Maine.

Pedersen said branzino has another characteristic valuable to consumers: It’s locally raised in an industry in which 95 percent of the product is imported, he said.

“We don’t have very good quality seafood in this country,” he said. “We don’t know where it comes from, how long it’s been dead or how it’s been farmed.”

Pedersen uses what’s known as a recirculating aquaculture system with tanks filtering out and recycling fish waste. With a treatment system that removes salt from the waste nutrients are extracted and used in an aquaponics system Pedersen intends to use to grow and sell produce.

Mattel said the recirculating aquaculture system is “generally a much more sustainable fish farming” method than pens in open bodies of water. Habitats are typically depleted of nutrients in exterior pens, he said, requiring operators to move and let the sites regenerate.

For Waterbury, the aquaculture business marks a new turn in its economic development.

What Ideal Fish produces is a lot different from brass buttons, clock parts, hinges, screws and other long-gone fixtures of manufacturing that were fabricated in Waterbury. But it fits into a plan by Waterbury to rebrand itself as it prepares for a groundbreaking in the spring of a regional “food hub,” O’Leary said.

The food hub facility is intended to give farms an opportunity to wash their produce, enter new markets and create other food products. And Ideal Fish could dovetail into those new plans for local business, O’Leary said.

“When we lost brass we lost a lot,” O’Leary said. “This brought in something so out of the box, it’s thrilling.”