The prospective customer involuntarily took a step back when Michael Xu opened his cooler outside the barn at Chip-In Farm to reveal dozens of flukes stacked neatly, reminiscent of the content in Willy Loman’s sample case depicted in “Death of a Salesman.”
“Everybody has the resources in their own kitchen to prepare a whole fish,” he said, adding that one of his signature videos “shows how easy it is to clean fish.”
The 27-year-old Ledgewood Drive resident has combined what he calls an infectious passion for fishing with promotional video skills to establish a thriving business selling fish he mostly catches the same day.
He has more than 150,000 Instagram followers plus about 50,000 on Facebook under the handle Tackle2thePeople.
The Couvee family provides some outdoor space at Chip-In Farm for Xu to set up a sales tent on Fridays and Saturdays.
“There’s a massive need for good, high-quality fish. And people are willing to pay,” Xu remarked as he handed a recipe printout to a buyer. He sees part of his job as marketing the entire fish.
A Lexington High School and Brandeis University graduate, Xu was working as an executive recruiter in Manhattan. “The city was driving me crazy,” he said. “My days were surrounded by a concrete jungle.”
Then “one of my buddies took me fishing in Florida. I was blown away.
“I dove head first into it. I caught the bug,” he recounted, fishing at sunrise and sunset, five or six days a week, learning as much as he could, finding new waters, and posting videos of his adventures on YouTube and TikTok.
Xu traveled to New Hampshire seeking bass and jack crevalle – “That was some of the most fun I’d had in years.” He started surfcasting for striped bass in waters off the North Shore. “It opened up into so many different species.”
A couple of years ago Xu heard from a young nursing student who also runs fishing charters off Cape Cod. Camden Faria had seen some of the videos, and he and Xu teamed up for the first time on the west end of the Cape Cod Canal, landing “a bunch of 20-pound striped bass.” Xu said that was his first experience fishing from a boat. “We ended up becoming very great friends.”
Last summer was another first: commercial fishing. Xu, Faria, and a companion fished for 12 hours, then sold the catch to wholesalers. For all that time and effort, the three of them cleared $600, “That,” Xu stated, “absolutely revolted me.”
“I started to learn more about the industry,” Xu said. “I wanted to learn what their day was like, about all the regulations,” even the process of power washing a boat.
Faria was delighted with the visibility from the video postings, and Xu said, “We thought, ‘What if we made a business out of this? Throw fish into a cooler and sell them to customers the same day.’”
The first time they caught pollock and just gave it all away to spread the word. Xu used his YouTube channel to share testimonials: “Everyone lost their minds because it was so fresh.
“In April we caught 150 pounds of squid, announced it on video, and sold out in one day,” Xu continued. That was followed by a haul of scup, then mackerel. Cod, haddock. What doesn’t fit the species of the day goes back into the water.
Xu said he and Faria and their team are on the water up to 12 hours at a time, always using rods and reels. “Everything we catch, we sell within two days,” he said. “We move more than 200 pounds a week,” with particular species – always with fins – often depending on the season. He calls it “pasture-raised fish.” They also source from other small-vessel fishermen.
Supermarket shoppers have become accustomed to “having fish on demand,” Xu said. The tradeoff, he said, is a decline in freshness, “and we’ve kind of gotten used to that.” Fish caught by commercial trawler can take several days to move to the retailer, and “by the time it’s sold, it’s not the same product.”
As presented on his YouTube channel, “I like to make cool, engaging videos that tell a story to people,” he said, “about how fish from the ocean get to your dinner table.” He said the direct-to-consumer operation reflects a personal commitment to sustainability and conservation.
“A lot of cultures are accustomed to eating the entire fish. The way they cook it is whole, and after they eat, what’s left is a bare skeleton,” Xu observed. He added when a fileted fish is served to Asians, some respond, “Where’s the rest of the fish?”
Loading ...
