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Romanian immigrant Cornel Ceapa has spent seven years building an international appetite for New Brunswick sturgeon at his own lonely expense. Now, thanks to his vision and drive, he might just put this part of the planet on the map as a plentiful New World supplier of an endangered Old World delicacy.
It’s clear I’ve caught Dr. Cornel Ceapa in the middle of something seminal. On this crisp January morning, the otherwise cheerful Romanian emigré appears a tad rushed, even distracted, as he answers questions about the passion that ensconces him in the prettily arranged riverside community of Carter’s Point, just north of Saint John, New Brunswick. “It’s all quite complicated,” he breathes heavily. “Let’s just say we’ve had to go through a lot of trial and error. I really should start on my memoirs or something, but I don’t have time. Today, for example, I’m driving to Halifax with a shipment of male gonads.”
Pardon?
“Yeah, I have to get them to my freight forwarder who will send them to one of my customers in Italy. It’s amazing what you can do with these things. In this case, they’ll be extracting some chemicals useful for making cosmetics. It’s exciting when you think about it. But I’ve got to keep them cool, so I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
By all means, I venture. After all, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And, evidently, a sturgeon’s… um… balls wait for no one. Still, the 43-year-old biologist-cum-businessman, who packed in a good job at the University of Romania and packed up his wife and son in to settle in this bucolic setting seven years ago, might also agree that his arrival at this stage in his entrepreneurial development has been less about “hurry” than hurry-up-and-wait. In fact, his journey has been a tough, often unorthodox, study in vision, enterprise and, most crucially, patience.
Indeed, his Acadian Sturgeon and Caviar Inc. has just won a three-year battle (Ceapa prefers to characterize this as a “series of discussions”) with federal regulators to export its caviar outside Canada. The victory affords the tiny company, which employs five people during the frantic summer season and fewer in the winter, access to international markets where knowledge of, and appreciation for, the salty delicacy is better and higher than in The Great White North. This heralds a much-needed cash-flow boost for the operation’s hatchery and processing plant.
Currently, Ceapa explains, the company buys wild sturgeon from fishermen along the St. John River to produce frozen and smoked fillets and reproductive organs for sale to markets in Canada, Europe, Asia and the United States. It also ships, from its hatchery, fertilized eggs and larvae for augmenting both wild and farmed populations around the world. “For a small business, we do okay,” he says. “Our annual sales run about $350,000. You know, it pays the bills.”
The agreement with Ottawa over caviar (which are, for the culinarily challenged, unfertilized eggs) suggests, to Ceapa at least, that business is about to boom. “It’s going to be a very, very good year,” he predicts. “And this will get me closer to my next step of building my own grow-out operation and becoming a fully integrated aquaculture company. I already have 6.5 acres picked out close to the hatchery and processing plant. We are now in quite promising times.”
Fishing, whether harvesting the leviathan depths or raising populations in pens, is not for the faint-hearted. Almost everything that can go wrong does – from running afoul of government regulations and environmental standards to confronting fickle consumer tastes and dilletantish markets. In this context, you’d have to be an entrepreneur in possession of extraordinarily deep pockets or in possession of nothing even casually resembling a full set of marbles to farm sturgeon, which are, in fact, endangered in many parts of the world.
As it happens, Ceapa is neither, but he does acknowledge the unique and exquisite difficulties in his chosen vocation. “First of all, this is a very long-term return situation,” he says. “In our climate, you are looking at a seven to 10 year investment before you can look at any big dollars from caviar. There’s also the technology, which is still pretty new in many parts of the world. Then, there’s the marketing angle, which is the most important thing in any business. And markets for luxury products are not always easy. You are dealing with a buying cycle that’s not always consistent. And with non-caviar sturgeon products, like the meat, you are actually educating markets. So, in many respects it’s been like building from the ground up.”
