What are the advantages and disadvantages of opening up Louisville holding tanks versus shipping live lobsters out of Bedford to the United States?

Clearwater Seafoods Limited Partnership of Bedford, Nova Scotia (NS), near Halifax, founded in 1976, is one of the largest harvesters, processors, and distributors of shellfish in the world. It has a combined total of 10 company-owned and joint venture-operated vessels that harvest in the North Atlantic and off the coast of Argentina. It also has two subsidiaries: one in Argentina harvesting scallops off of the Argentinean continental shelf, and one harvesting prawns off of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) and selling them worldwide. Its processing facilities are Pierce Fisheries (in Lockeport, NS, 200 km southwest of Halifax), which
produces frozen scallops and lobster; a facility in St. Anthony, NL, which produces frozen shrimp; a facility in Grand Bank, NL, which produces clams; Highland Fisheries in Glace Bay, NS, which produces snow crab; a facility in Arichat, NS, which holds live lobsters in a dryland pound holding facility in the state of hibernation (8 million pounds per year go through Arichat); another live lobster holding facility in Bedford; and a third live lobster holding facility (with two 25,000 gallon saltwater tanks) in Louisville, Kentucky, for U.S. distribution. It also has cold storage facilities in the United Kingdom, France, and China, and ships globally out of Bedford.

The live lobsters are sold to many of the world's finest restaurants at short notice (24 hours)-over 30,000 pounds per week. Shipping live lobsters is a time-sensitive challenge. Clearwater ships live lobsters (in boxes) out of Halifax but this process was experiencing some difficulties because of delays due to paperwork mix-ups, technology interruptions, banning of gel packs to chill the lobster in-transit after September 11, 2001, and customs backlogs. A solution to this problem for shipping to the United States was to truck live lobsters (a 36-hour journey) once or twice a week from Bedford to Louisville (the U.S. air hub of UPS) on special reefer trucks, hold the lobsters in Louisville in cold water in saltwater tanks waiting for customer orders, and then courier them via UPS.

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