Vessel Services Inc. of Portland always gets a bit of a boo-st in consumer sales right around Halloween.

The company doesn’t sell costumes, masks, pumpkins or even candy. But it does sell one hard-to-find item that is popular among Halloween party organizers and creators of haunted holiday displays.

Vessel Services is the leading seller of dry ice in southern Maine. Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, which, when submerged in water, produces a dense, spooky fog that spills out across flat surfaces. It is the key material used in fog machines for haunted-house attractions, theater productions and nightclubs.

Halloween enthusiasts are a far shriek from Vessel Services’ usual clientele, according to company CEO and General Manager Alan Tracy. The company primarily serves fishing and seafood-processing businesses on the waterfront. However, it does have a retail store at 1 Portland Fish Pier, and one of the products it sells there is dry ice.

Dry ice is useful for keeping seafood and other products frozen during shipment, which is the primary reason Vessel Services carries it. It is the material of choice for air shipment of frozen gourmet foods such as Maine crab cakes and lobster macaroni and cheese.

“It’s neater, because it sublimates – it doesn’t melt,” Tracy said.

Sublimation is the process by which a solid changes directly into a gas without ever becoming a liquid. Carbon dioxide, which solidifies at minus 109 degrees Fahrenheit, sublimates in warmer temperatures as long as it is not highly pressurized.

In other words, when the Maine seafood’s recipient opens the package at its destination, everything is still frozen and dry as a bone.

Still, there is a lot more to dry ice than keeping seafood frozen, and a lot more to Vessel Services than dry ice, Tracy said.

People buy dry ice for all sorts of reasons, he said, and few businesses in Maine sell it. It can be used to make ice cream, clean surfaces of rust and grease, increase the potency of marijuana, remove noxious gases from empty tanks, reduce the hair-loss effects of chemotherapy, conduct science experiments and keep just about anything frozen, he said.

“Moose hunters will come for dry ice to pack the moose – that’s very common,” Tracy said.

To make selling dry ice profitable requires having a base of steady customers such as seafood processors to buy the dry ice before it literally disappears. Freezing it in a standard freezer doesn’t help, either, Tracy said, because the temperature is still too warm to prevent sublimation.

“It’s risky business because of its short shelf life,” Tracy said. “If you don’t sell it, it’s gone.”

Vessel Services stores most of its dry ice outside in bins because keeping it indoors would flood the facility with carbon dioxide gas. It must be handled carefully, because direct skin exposure causes frostbite, he said.

Dry ice is a relatively small part of the company’s overall business, he said. Standard, water ice is much bigger. Vessel Services has its own ice-making equipment that can produce up to 150 tons of ice per day. Its on-site storage bin can hold up to 300 tons.

As with dry ice, the company’s primary ice customer is the seafood industry. Vessel Services uses compressed air to shoot the ice through pipes to deliver it onto ships, into trucks and directly to the Portland Fish Exchange a quarter-mile away.

The company also operates an ice-delivery service for parties, festivals, restaurants and other commercial and consumer uses. In addition, it sells fuel, bait and fishing equipment.

For the moment, Vessel Services is stocking up on dry ice for the Halloween customers it expects to see beginning Friday.

“It’s a positive for us,” Tracy said. “It’s a whole new demographic of people who usually aren’t here day to day.”

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