Maine attraction: Lobster cart a 'Plan B' hit for Fort Collins couple.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: BUSINESS AS USUAL

DOUG AND NANCY VAN REETH HAD NO jobs lined up when they returned to Northern Colorado in April after eight years in Maine. The two met in the late '90s at the Loveland Reporter Herald, where he was chief photographer and she was a graphic designer, but they knew they weren't going back to the shrinking newspaper industry.

It didn't take them long to come up with an alternative. A Panera Bread poster of a lobster roll that Nancy insisted on packing for the trip back to Colorado was the only "art" they had to adorn a wall of their temporary living quarters, a studio apartment above a friend's warehouse in Windsor. After a few weeks, that memento from Maine switched on a light bulb in their heads.

That idea: Mile High Lobster Shack, a food cart they now operate in and around Fort Collins featuring chunks of Maine lobster nestled in a buttered and toasted bun, served on a bed of Utz Potato Stix with two small dill pickles and a lemon wedge. They also sell hotdogs and brats, but as word of the Maine attraction has spread, the $13 lobster rolls have come to outsell the $5 brats and $4 hotdogs as much as 10-1 depending on the venue, Doug says.

Doug, 59, and Nancy, 56, are like many emerging from the recession who have thrust themselves into entrepreneurism, propelled by a mix of inspiration and desperation. In Maine, Doug had been hired as photo editor of the Lewiston Sun-Journal, but that job was eliminated 2 1/2 years later. He landed a job as a copy editor for a software company, but was laid off from that, too, after two years.

So he became a substitute teacher, until, he says, "We decided I was just using that as a crutch and was going nowhere." When Nancy was laid off as a graphic designer at L.L. Bean, that sealed the deal. They were moving back to Colorado.

"We were fortunate in that we had capital to do this," Doug says of the...