Sabin Lomac and Jim Tselikis grew up together in Maine and, years later, both found themselves in Los Angeles wanting the lobster rolls they couldn’t get on the West Coast. In 2012 they bought a single food truck, started flying in fresh Maine lobster, and pitched the idea on Shark Tank that same year. Barbara Corcoran made the deal: $55,000 for 15% equity.
Why a real-estate mogul, for a food truck
Corcoran doesn’t have a food or restaurant background — her career is in New York real estate. What she brought instead was operational scaling experience: how to systematize a business so a second location, then a tenth, then a fiftieth, can run without the founders personally supervising every one. For a food-truck business trying to become a national brand, that kind of process discipline mattered more than culinary expertise.
What actually scaled it
Cousins Maine Lobster expanded through a franchise model — letting local operators run trucks and, later, brick-and-mortar restaurants under the Cousins brand, with the founders and Corcoran focused on the supply chain (sourcing and flying in Maine lobster consistently) and the brand standard rather than every individual location’s day-to-day operations. That franchise structure is what let a single truck become a genuinely national footprint rather than a regional Los Angeles business.
Where it stands now
The company has grown to roughly 50 trucks and restaurants across 45 U.S. cities, and the founders announced in 2025 that Cousins Maine Lobster had surpassed $1 billion in cumulative nationwide sales since the Shark Tank deal — with the business now generating an estimated $50 million or more in annual sales. Corcoran has referred to the deal as one of her standout investments from the show.
The actual lesson in the deal
The Cousins Maine Lobster story is a reminder that the specific product — lobster rolls, in this case — is often not what a Shark Tank deal is really about. The founders had a genuinely good, differentiated food product and real early demand. What they were missing, and what Corcoran actually supplied, was the operational playbook to turn one truck’s success into a repeatable, franchisable system. That’s a fundamentally different skill than cooking, and it’s the one that determined whether this stayed a single food truck or became a national brand.
