You want what Emily Caslow is smoking*

*It's smoked fish. My conversation with a fourth-generation owner of Acme Smoked Fish.

If you enjoyed this post, head to the bottom of the page to like or comment so others can find it. Thank you!

Acme Fish is a century old smoked fish business based out of Brooklyn, New York City. A fourth generation family business, Acme supplies some of New York’s top restaurants as well as grocery stores around the country. Emily Caslow grew up helping her family sell fish and is now the Chair of Acme Smoked Fish Foundation & an Owner. We chatted about expanding and modernizing the New York icon.

Brianna Plaza: Tell me a bit about your background and your role at Acme Fish. 

Emily Caslow: Acme Smoked Fish was started by my great grandfather, Harry Brownstein, in 1906, and I’m a fourth generation owner. 

I grew up listening to family members talk about work, and it was always something that interested me. When we were on school breaks, my brother and I would always ask if we could come to work.

Some of my best memories growing up were at Fish Friday. At that point, it was a very Polish neighborhood, and so it was mostly people lining up for sledzie (herring). I remember climbing up on a stepladder and reaching my arm into this big barrel of fish to pull them out. I also got paid a penny a label to label boxes. Those are my first memories of working at Acme.

I went to Emory University in Atlanta and studied business and got a degree in marketing and consulting. I came back to New York and had a short career in development and fundraising for a non-profit. I realized that I’d grown up watching my parents be involved in philanthropy, and I realized actually that I could volunteer with meaningful causes and work at Acme. So in 2003ish, I came to Acme and started in our marketing department when I was the single person doing marketing with zero budget.

What I learned that is you need to be able to do everything. You might need to move a truck, so I learned. I learned how to make deliveries. I knew how to put the orders together. I knew how to take an order. The only thing I couldn't do was really put the racks of fish into the smokehouse.

I really enjoyed learning the business, but I left for a few years to raise my kids. When I came back, the business had changed and they were hiring people for certain roles. I had been the president of the PTA so I thought, I can deal with complaining parents so I can deal with complaining customers, so I was the customer service manager for several years. 

Then COVID happened, and I wasn't at Acme every day, and customer service is really a full-time job, so I transitioned to my current role leading the foundation.

Brianna Plaza: You recently rebranded. How do you strike the balance of modernizing without going too modern? 

Emily Caslow: The idea was to be able to innovate and still be attractive and interesting to our broadening consumer base, while still maintaining the legacy traditions of a family business.

When you talk about a rebrand, it's like there's something wrong with the brand that you're looking to change it. Versus a refresh where you just want to modernize a little bit. We spent a lot of time talking about what it was that we wanted to convey, and it really boiled down to three things: craft, connection, and continuity.

We wanted to be able to highlight that our craft which hasn't changed. We're still using the highest quality ingredients. Our processes haven't changed and our recipes have stayed consistent.

And we wanted to focus on connection. It’s an old school food that signifies connection and celebrations. We wanted to make sure that we convey that. We also wanted to show the continuity of the family business and the fact that we’ve been in business for so long. 

Brianna Plaza: Your production has expanded beyond Brooklyn and you’ll be expanding your Brooklyn smokehouse in the next few years. Why was it important to maintain a footprint in Brooklyn as you grew? 

Emily Caslow: We are Brooklyn born and when you go back to the ‘40s, '50s, and '60s, smokehouses were all over Brooklyn. This is where they started, and it's important to us to keep our roots in the neighborhood. It's ebbed and flowed over the years, but Acme has been a primary place for jobs for the community, and we feel connected to the area, and we wanted to stay.

We also still host Fish Fridays where we sell directly to the local community. Fish Friday started, I think, in the '60s, '70s. It started because there were leftovers and we didn't know what to do with them. It started with predominantly herring and we opened to the public every Friday. 

From there, a few things happened. Word of mouth and maybe a guidebook added us as a stop in Greenpoint. The neighborhood changed, so there were different people coming through, and we became a place to go for the freshest smoked fish. There's even a Brooklyn Runners' Club that runs by on Fridays.

For years, a woman named Monica and my cousin, Gary Brownstein, were the two people behind the register, and people would wait for them. The line would snake through the warehouse. Only in New York City would people wait in lines for something like this. 

Now, it's a staple, not just in the Greenpoint community, but people come from all over. Cars are double, triple parked to pick up their orders.

Brianna Plaza: Why are your sustainability practices an important pillar of a modern Acme?

Emily Caslow: My uncle Eric Caslow passed away four years ago, and we wanted to do something to honor his memory, so we launched the Acme Smoked Fish Foundation.

He was a history teacher before he came to work in the family business, and education was always super important to him, especially the education of our employees and their families. Just like our family came from immigrants, we have a lot of immigrant employees.

We have our education awards, which grants scholarships to Acme employees' children to attend two-year or four-year college, and certificate programs in an effort to help the people who have worked for us for so long.

Then we launched our Seafood Industry Climate Awards, which is in line with our sustainability efforts because we want to leave the earth a better place than we found it. We have been funding some really interesting projects with the Seafood Industry Climate Awards.

We also give back 1% from certain product lines, like our Acme-branded cold-smoked sliced salmon. We want to lead in our industry and there’s still a lot we can do.