“Meet the Vendor” Jared Auerbach, Owner of Red’s Best

Congratulations to Red’s Best for winning Boston magazine’s “2016 Best Fish Market” award!

Visit the Market to snap your photo in an 11 foot fishing boat this summer, courtesy of Red’s Best (watch the boat move into the Market on 6/29 at 10:30am!)

Tell us a little bit about your business.

Red’s Best is a seafood company. We work with about 1,000 local fishermen, and we have 20 refrigerated trucks that we send out all over the region to small remote ports where we meet the boats coming in from a day’s fishing. We take their entire catch and everything aggregates at our facility at our fish pier in Boston. We then process, pack, and distribute the fish all over the world from there. What’s unique about us is that we focus our efforts on working with a lot of small boats, and we handle everything that comes out of the ocean, so we have a tremendous variety of great local items. Because we’re buying directly from boats and selling fish to large wholesalers and distributors all over the world, we can cherry-pick that product and offer the best of the best directly to the consumers at the Boston Public Market.

Why were you interested in joining the market?

Right now, most of the sales we make are in large quantities of fish and we’re in a unique position to make direct one-to-one matches between real end users and real commercial fishermen. It’s an exciting opportunity for us. In representing these boats in the market, our job is to create demand for what they’re catching. We live in New England; the whole world is jealous of what we have here, and a lot of the time we’re not connecting those dots from boat to plate, so taking advantage of it is an incredible opportunity for us.

What is your favorite thing about working at the market?

I love the whole Market and even shop at my own stall. Although I own this seafood company and we sell all of this fish, I come here to eat a crab cake made with our local crab that’s ridiculously good. I don’t really buy my own fish unless I do it here. On top of that I love the other vendors too; the lettuce that we use from Corner Stalk Farm is phenomenal. Overall, I really love it as a consumer.

What do you like to do outside of the market?

Fish. I spearfish, freedive, and just fish for fun. I play with my kids; I have two daughters, 1 and 3 years old, and I’m trying to get them into fishing – so far so good!

If you could be anything else, what would you be?

I was going to be an inner city math teacher and started working on Red’s Best after school; one thing lead to another, and I just couldn’t get away from fish.

What was the first thing you learned to cook?

The first thing I was good at making was ceviche because it’s about making the seafood the star of the plate. When I prepare food, I like to throw quality ingredients together. It’s different every time.