Topsail Steamer, a Jersey Shore seafood steam pot take-out shop, will appear on Shark Tank

OCEAN CITY, N.J. — Danielle Mahon has been up to her elbows in seafood since opening the Topsail Steamer, a take-out seafood steam pot shop. After launching her first store in North Carolina, she expanded to four locations at the Jersey Shore. But earlier this year, she went for the big catch: the sharks on “Shark Tank.”

The episode she appears in airs Oct. 25 on ABC. She served the sharks seafood, dramatically spilling out of her signature steam pots onto the brown paper she says everyone loves.

“People are emotionally attached to the brown paper,” said Mahon, 55, who held a corporate job in the life sciences before becoming an entrepreneur.

The Inquirer spoke with Mahon prior to the show’s airing. Here are the takeaways.

Mahon grew up in Marlton and Tabernacle and moved to North Carolina in 2003.

There, she worked in a full-service restaurant that served to-go seafood steam kits in big black-and-white lobster pots that people took home and had to return later. That’s where Mahon found her concept: a seafood steam pot shop where you take home the food — seafood, sausage, veggies, seasoning — in a single-use pot.

You steam it yourself with beer or water (it’s not a boil; instructions only call for two cups of liquid), and then discard the pot (or recycle, or repurpose for, say, holding flip flops.)

“I thought, I think we can do this without a full-service restaurant, without a seafood market,” she said. “That’s what makes the concept unique. We really don’t cook anything.”

Mahon opened her first Topsail Steamer in 2017 on Topsail Island, N.C. Three years later, she expanded to the Jersey Shore. The company now franchises (so far only to family members), and has 10 stores in all, including in Ocean City, Ship Bottom, Sea Isle City, and Wildwood. There’s one in Bethany Beach, Del., as well.

“I knew from what I knew about the Jersey Shore that this should be the next place to open,” she said. “We opened in 2020 in Ocean City, smack dab in the middle of COVID. Right away, we had lines out the door.” Southern style can be a low-country boil, but her product is meant to be steamed, more Northern, like a clam bake or steamed crabs. “The Northerners really took to that,” she said.

And of course, they also really liked the brown paper that comes with each order. “I grew up picking blue crabs on brown paper,” she said.

Mahon sources locally whenever possible. In the South, it’s shrimp; in New Jersey, it’s scallops and oysters. Her menu features seven varieties of Bay Buckets. She hasn’t quite figured out how to incorporate blue claw crabs, but people ask.

The product is also available to be shipped on Goldbelly.

She went on the show hoping for a partner “with the capital to be able to invest in technology, knowing there’s a possibility to help with the strategy and growth.”

In one of the photos from the show, you can see Mahon looks happy and confident, her nerves betrayed only by the death grip clench of her hands. It’s the only sign of how nervous she was, especially for the 90-second opening pitch that starts the moment you walk through those double doors.

“I was so nervous,” she said. “You have that 90-second pitch, there’s no do-overs, none. That’s it. They never stop the cameras rolling. Just that is so nerve-racking. It’s such a big opportunity.”

In all, she said, the sharks were nicer to her than she thought they’d be, and seemed genuinely interested in her pitch. She had applied in January, and filmed in June in Los Angeles.

The shark Mahon really wanted to meet was Barbara Corcoran, who wasn’t on the episode. But she got some heavy hitters: Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner, Kevin O’Leary, and Robert Herjavec. The guest judge was Todd Graves, cofounder of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers.

“I can say that they were all really excited by the product,” she said.

She said she was in the tank for about 45 minutes in all.

With her husband cooking offscreen, Mahon said, she served each shark their own little plate of food.

“In the middle of my 90 seconds, I did actually dump a pot of seafood,” she said. “I dumped it on the table next to me, on the brown paper. If you look at our menu, what we’re eating is the Wrightsville Bay Bucket [snow crab, large sea scallops, peel-and-eat shrimp, littleneck clams, andouille sausage, kielbasa, sweet corn, red bliss potatoes, onion] and added lobster.”

That will now be known as the “Shark Bite Bucket,” she said, in anticipation of a deluge of Shark Tank traffic.

You’ll have to wait for the airing to find out if she made a deal with any of the sharks. Mahon won’t share the details of her pitch, but a Shark Tank appearance typically will send a crush of people to the business no matter the outcome.

She says she’s ready for the deluge. “We know it has so much potential,” she said.

For now, New Jersey customers will have to wait until next summer to visit Topsail Steamer in-person as the stores are closed for the season.