Where it all began
The first website to sell seafood online.
In the mid-1990s, Greg Cain was a network engineer at the local health department, and a Crisfield kid who’d grown up working the crab-processing plants and spent his summers as a mate on a crab boat. When the World Wide Web was brand new, he put the two halves of his life together: crabs and the internet.
Greg and his brother Matt built it anyway.
Nobody had ever sold a crab online. Most people didn’t trust buying anything over the internet yet, and e-commerce as we know it barely existed. In 1996, from Crisfield, Maryland, they shipped the first seafood ever sold over the web.
Est. 1996 · Crisfield, MD
The Baltimore Sun · March 4, 2001
It started off the back porch.
Greg wrote the first website himself, and it was gloriously crude. There was no shopping cart. That hadn’t been invented yet. He hand-coded a form: you picked your crabs, it added up your total, and you used a printed chart to figure your own shipping and type it in. The order landed in his inbox, he double-checked your math, and ran your card on a terminal the bank had just sold him.
They hadn’t taken a single order and had no idea if they ever would. When the first one finally came in, Greg ran around figuring out (in real time) how to buy the crabs, pack them, and get them to the door before they spoiled. Thirty years of trial and error later, we’ve turned that scramble into the most dialed-in seafood-shipping operation in the country.
Maryland experts. The best of American seafood.
We were born in Crisfield, the Crab Capital of the World, where the American crab industry began. Greg and Matt learned the trade in its plants and on its boats. Knowing, hands-on, what a great crab actually is. That’s our foundation.
We buy as many crabs as we can right here in Maryland and process every one in Crisfield. But we’re not precious about a zip code. We’re precious about quality. When Maryland crabs are mid-molt and running light, we know it, and we’ll bring that week’s catch in from Virginia, the Carolinas, or the Gulf to put a heavier, better crab in your box. Thirty years of relationships up and down the coast let us find the best crab, at the best price, in any season.
That same expertise is how a Maryland crab house ships the best lobster tails on the planet, the best scallops, the best fish. We don’t claim to pull the traps in Maine. We claim to know how to pick the best of what comes out of them.
