Secrets of Canada’s Best Managed Companies 2017 In 2015, they ventured into the wild fishing business.

They’ve gained control of virtually all aspects of the business in Atlantic Canada and Maine, from farming to packaging to distribution. Outside Canada, the company has farming operations across the United States, Chile, Spain, Scotland, Argentina, and Uruguay, along with corporate ofﬁces in France, China and Japan. It has been recognized as one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies since 2006. Today, the Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick-based company is called Cooke Aquaculture and employs over 1,600 people in the region: including Nicholls, who is now the chief operating officer. The trio was motivated not only by a desire to start their own business, but to create jobs for other locals who had skills and ambition-people like Nicholls, who joined in 2007 when the Cookes acquired a previous employer. Glenn Cooke, his father Gifford and brother Michael launched Kelly Cove Salmon, with a small government grant and 5,000 salmon hatchlings in two wooden cages. In the late 1980s, commercial fish farming was in its infancy, and Atlantic Canada was a promising epicentre for the burgeoning sector, so Nicholls shifted from farm feed to fish feed. There was one niche, however, where the opposite was happening. But, just as he launched a career, the local farming industry dried up. After high school, he enrolled in agricultural college to get a formal education and entered the livestock feed business after graduation.

Growing up on a dairy farm in New Brunswick, Kris Nicholls knew two things for certain: he would become a farmer himself, and he would stay in Atlantic Canada. At its salmon farm sites in Atlantic Canada and Maine, Cooke Aquaculture utilizes state-of-the-art, automated feeding systems like this one at Rattling Beach in Nova Scotia.

Catan fish