Let’s start off with what Heavenly Fish isn’t: it’s not a seafood store.
“We sell a lot of angelfish. It would take about 300 of those things to equal a six-ounce steak,” said owner Anthony DiVito.
Heavenly Fish, formerly Heavenly Fish Angelfish, has been in Ewing since 1979, quietly building a fish empire. They sell pet fish, about one million every week, to pet shops large and small throughout the Northeast. If you see a fish in a tank at Wal-Mart east of Ohio and north of Maryland, there is close to a 100 percent chance it came from Heavenly Fish’s warehouse on Lexington Drive in Ewing. They sell angelfish, goldfish, betas and small koi. They even sell glofish, the worlds first genetically engineered pet. Glofish reflect brilliant neon colors when exposed to ultraviolet light.
The fish are not bred at Heavenly Fish. Rather, the huge rows of tanks that fill the Lexington Drive warehouse are full of recent immigrants to the country. The fish there are just off a plane from southeast Asia or Central America. They wait a week to ensure they are disease free. Then, workers, armed with nets and order forms, go from tank to tank scooping out fish for orders, putting them in plastic bags full of water, and then boxing them up and putting them on the loading dock.
Some of the fish were raised on fish farms in Thailand or Vietnam. Others were snatched up from reefs in the Philippines by enterprising coral divers.
Now, Heavenly Fish is the largest distributor in the state. But it had very humble beginnings. In the 1960s, DiVito’s father bred fish as a hobby and sold the extras because he didn’t know what to do with them. Before long, his parents had set up 200 tanks in the back of the family home and began breeding them as a business. Soon they set up more tanks in the garage, and then bought a separate building and became a legitimate company.
DiVito has spent almost his whole life caring for fish.
“I’ve been doing this since I was 10 years old,” he said.
DiVito took over Heavenly Fish in 2005. His daughter Megan works at the company now, but his other two children aren’t interested in the fishy family business, which employs 30 people, down from its heydey of 70 several years ago, DiVito said.
Heavenly Fish sells a handful of exotic fish. DiVito has seen saltwater rockfish and cowfish pass through. But mostly he prefers to sell popular mass-market fish.
“I don’t want to sell one koi for three hundred dollars. That stuff you really sit on. We’re going to sell three hundred koi for one dollar each. We’re going to sell that a lot faster.”
Heavenly Fish is located at 62 Lexington Ave. in Ewing. For more information, go online to heavenlyfish.com or call (800) 772-9542.
Anthony DiVito at the Heavenly Fish warehouse in Ewing. (Staff photo by Diccon Hyatt.),
