Fred Greene has seen a lot in some 50 years in the Nova Scotia fish business.  In the 1980s, for example, he witnessed the near collapse of the industry, when Ottawa had to step in and bail out the biggest players to keep them afloat after they had engaged in an orgy of building too many processing plants and boats. He's seen towns like Canso, a 400-year-old fishing community on the northwestern tip of the island that survived plundering by the pirate Black Bart in the 1700s, collapse along with the cod stocks. One cod plant alone employed a quarter of the town's population. (Facing a budget deficit of almost $200,000 and a dwindling population that couldn't cover it, Canso decided to call it quits as a town late last year.)

Through the years, though, Fred Greene has managed to not only stay afloat, but to thrive by focusing on catching, processing and retailing top quality seafood. It hasn't been easy. Greene has built his company, Fisherman's Market of Halifax, into a vertically integrated business that owns numerous licenses, operates several hook-and-line fishing boats and operates several buying stations with live lobster holding tanks in four Nova Scotia ports, including Canso, and a processing plant and retail market in Halifax.

Fisherman's Market sells customers throughout Canada, the U.S., Europe and worldwide. Sustainability is an important issue to Fisherman's Market and they have been strong supporters and a part of the steering committee behind getting several local fisheries certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. As a result, Fisherman's Market can now offer scallops, haddock and harpoon swordfish from fisheries that have been MSC-certified. Meanwhile, several additional local fisheries have applied for MSC certification.

Still, some stocks, especially cod, have a long way to go before towns like Canso can recover. One of the impediments to the recovery of these stocks, say Nova Scotia processors like Greene, is an explosion in grey seal populations, some stocks of which have increased 10-fold in recent years. Off the southwest coast of the province, on the Scotian Shelf, there are so many seals Greene won't buy groundfish from there because the fish are infested with parasites from the seals. It all comes down to quality, he says. "I always tell my staff: If you wouldn't eat it yourself, don't sell it."

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