(Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we offer our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems).
Growing up in Texas, spring’s arrival was marked by blooming tulips at the Dallas Arboretum, the sonic hoopla of the South By Southwest music festival, and a steady cadence of crawfish boils. While they all became beloved traditions in my world, the one I have missed the most since moving to Colorado is the crawfish boil.
But my heart – and stomach – no longer feel that pang of homesickness because this year, my husband figured out how to bring the crawfish boil to the Rocky Mountains, with help from the Louisiana Crawfish Company.
Based in Natchitoches, La., the Louisiana Crawfish Company has built a booming business shipping crawfish to Southerners throughout the country who are craving a taste of home. As CEO and second-generation farmer Avery Smith tells it, that mission came about accidentally.
Smith’s father purchased a 50-acre crawfish pond in the 1980s and farmed them to supply local restaurants in Louisiana. Sometime in the 1990s, her father sought to find a way to get crawfish to a friend who had moved to the Northeast. That inspired “a lot of trial and error,” Smith said, to figure out how to move the mudbugs long distances quickly and safely, so they remained alive. (Crawfish, like other crustaceans, must be alive before they are cooked to minimize the risk of bacterial growth.)
The Smith family’s grand experiment paid off. Today, Louisiana Crawfish Company is strictly an e-commerce business, shipping an average of 2 million pounds of crawfish each year, Avery said. Though crawfish makes up more than half of its business, the company sells other Cajun delicacies like boudin, king cakes, crab, oysters, alligator meat and more.
How exactly does it work? Customers first choose how many pounds of crawdads they want and then select the day they want them delivered. Louisiana Crawfish Company advises cooking the seafood the same day it arrives on your doorstep. (No need to worry about someone seeing you accept that package, as it became legal to import mudbugs to Colorado in 2023.)
Freshness is key to the company’s success, and Smith is able to guarantee that the crawfish arrive on time and intact through the trusted partnerships her family has made over the last four decades in business. The company ships within 24 hours via Southwest cargo planes, FedEx and UPS.
“The crawfish, once they’re harvested, they’re chilled in coolers. That slows their respiration and they become dormant. They’re shipped in that state … with frozen gel packs to make sure they stay that way. And that’s really the magic,” Smith said.
Indeed, it seems like magic. As a first-time customer, I was impressed by the punctuality and quality of my delivery, especially since we ordered from rural, landlocked Colorado.
We purchased 10 pounds of live crawfish, which cost about $113 after shipping, and included all the Cajun and Creole seasonings needed for the boil. All but a half-dozen of the crawfish were alive upon arrival.
Once we received them, we followed the instructions on Louisiana Crawfish Company’s website to ice them down until we were ready to rinse and boil. We hit up our local grocery store for all the additional fixins, such as corn and potatoes, and added a few extra seafood items like scallops, shrimp and crab.
Are you salivating yet? Because, yes, it was that good. So good, in fact, we will likely make this our new spring tradition.
You can, too, by ordering during peak season, which typically runs from January through July, depending on the weather. In the offseason, Louisiana Crawfish Company sells cooked and frozen crawfish and tail meat alongside its other products to satiate transplants all year round.
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