31 producers, chosen by us. Each card says who runs the farm, how the oysters are grown and where to find them, and links to the full profile.
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Henri Gillardeau founded the house in the Marennes-Oléron basin in 1898, and Gérard Gillardeau created the oyster that carries the name in 1978. The oysters are raised in Ireland, Normandy and Portugal, then finished and shipped from Bourcefranc-le-Chapus. Every shell has carried a laser-engraved G since 2014, to stop counterfeits.
Trade notesSold to Les Halles in Paris since 1928. Sold by weight grade; a N°2 weighs 86 to 110 g.
The Tsarskaya is the house spéciale of Les Parcs Saint-Kerber in Cancale. It is selected at the spat stage, grown for three to four years in the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel and sold with a filling index above 10.5, the threshold for the spéciale grade. The name nods to the Russian tsars and their taste for oysters.
The Cadorets have farmed flat oysters on the Bélon estuary since 1872, fifteen years after the river's first oyster park. Flats about three years old, born elsewhere in Brittany, are finished here in water that swings between fresh and salt with every tide.
King William III granted the Wallace family the oyster beds of Loch Ryan in 1701, and they have held them since. In 1996 Tristan and David Hugh-Jones joined them to bring the wild fishery back. Two fishermen take the largest oysters for market and relay the young ones onto the beds, about 20 metric tons a year.
Trade notesWild, dredged and seasonal. The Stranraer Oyster Festival has celebrated them since 2017.
Skip Bennett planted his first oysters in Duxbury Bay in 1992, after a parasite killed the clams he had been growing, in a bay that had never had wild oysters. The farm now runs its own hatchery, and its chief executive describes the bay as colder than nearby Cape Cod, with full ocean salinity.
Trade notesRaw bar, shop and The Winsor House restaurant in Duxbury.
Hog Island planted its first seed on a five-acre lease in Tomales Bay in July 1983, with John Finger and Terry Sawyer as partners. It now farms 160 acres there and 90 in Humboldt Bay, where it runs its own hatchery and nursery, and raises all five of the Northern Hemisphere's edible oyster species.
Trade notesThe Boat Oyster Bar and Hog Shack at the Marshall farm, and oyster bars in San Francisco.
The Zirlott family grows Murder Point oysters in floating baskets held up by air-filled pontoons, about 5,200 of them in Portersville Bay and a second, larger site in Grand Bay. Brent Zirlott, a fourth-generation fisherman, left shrimping for oysters after an Auburn University farming class in 2013. The name comes from a 1920s killing over oyster rights.
Trade notesGrown by Sandy Bay Oyster Company, Bayou La Batre. Tagline: "Oysters worth killing for."
Michael Kelly founded the farm more than 60 years ago in a small inlet of Galway Bay at Kilcolgan, and three generations of the family have worked it since. It grows about a million native and Pacific oysters a year, turns them every month to keep their shape, and packs them in seaweed.
Trade notesExports as far as Canada, Singapore and Dubai.
Lester Marshall set up Coffin Bay Oyster Farm on the Lower Eyre Peninsula in 1997, and it now covers 38 hectares across several arms of the bay. Its best-known oyster is the King, a Pacific grown far beyond normal market size, which the farm calls "the oyster steak of the ocean".
James Croxton leased two acres of Rappahannock River bottom in 1899. In 2001 his great-grandsons Ryan and Travis inherited about 200 acres of leases, when the bay's oysters were near 1% of historic levels, and switched to floating cages and hatchery seed. Le Bernardin became a regular customer in 2004.
Trade notesThree oysters: Rappahannock River (sweet), Rochambeau (mild) and Olde Salt (briny). Restaurants in several cities.
Taylor's Shigoku, released in 2009, grow in float bags that rise and fall with the tide in Willapa and Samish bays. The motion tumbles them, chips off new shell and builds a strong adductor, so they stay small, about 2 to 2.75 inches, with a deep cup. The method adapts British Columbia's Kusshi technique.
Trade notesTaylor also owns Fanny Bay Oysters in British Columbia.
The Hadden family started Fanny Bay Oysters in Baynes Sound more than 40 years ago and sold it to the Taylor family in 2006, who combined it with their Desolation Sound farms into Canada's largest shellfish producer. It runs every step itself, from hatchery and nursery to processing.
Trade notesSeafood shop on Baynes Sound; oyster bar and shellfish market in Vancouver.
Carlingford's oysters were rated above France's and England's in 1832 and declared extinct by 1883. Peter Louët-Feisser, a Dutchman who had sailed into the lough, started the company in 1974 after hearing a BBC radio item about them. His family, now in its third generation, grows Pacific oysters in mesh bags on intertidal trestles.
Trade notesPurified and packed on the lough shore.
The Hama Hama Company began as a timber business on Hood Canal in the 1890s and is now a sixth-generation shellfish and tree farm at the mouth of the Hamma Hamma River. Many of its oysters spawn naturally in the canal and set in the river delta rather than coming from a hatchery, and grow large with heavy, knobby shells.
Trade notesFarm store, online shop and the Oyster Saloon (since 2014) in Lilliwaup. Also sells the tumbled Blue Pool.
Johnny Noble, owner of the Ardkinglas estate, and the biologist Andy Lane started Loch Fyne Oysters at the head of the loch in 1978 or 1979, and opened an oyster bar at Clachan in 1988. The oysters grow for two to three years in baskets that control their exposure to the tide, and are purified in filtered seawater at Cairndow.
Trade notesThe restaurant chain of the same name is a separate business, sold to Greene King in 2007.
The Hawards have grown oysters in the creeks around Mersea Island since the 1700s. Richard Haward, the seventh generation, died in 2023, and his son Tom now runs the business, growing native flats and rock oysters in the Blackwater and Colne estuaries.
Trade notesStall at Borough Market, London; also sold through Billingsgate, to restaurants and by mail.
Whitstable's fishermen were incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1793, and in the 1850s they sent about 80 million oysters a year to Billingsgate. By the late 1970s, when Barrie Green and John Knight took over, one part-time dredger was left. Whitstable oysters won Protected Geographical Indication status in 1997.
Trade notesAlso grows Pacific oysters on trestles, about 300 metric tons in 2019.
Glidden Point has farmed the Damariscotta River for more than 30 years. Its oysters are planted on the bottom of the cold river and not harvested until they are four years old, and the farm says it is one of the only farms in the world where divers bring them up by hand.
Perry Raso started Matunuck Oyster Farm in 2002 on a seven-acre lease in Potter Pond, one of Rhode Island's coastal salt ponds, with a grant from a state aquaculture initiative. In 2009 he opened Matunuck Oyster Bar beside the pond, supplied from the water in front of its patio.
Trade notesMatunuck Oyster Bar, South Kingstown.
Jeff Gardner, his family and crew have farmed Winnapaug Pond in Westerly for more than 25 years. The pond sits behind a barrier beach about 100 yards from the open ocean and fills and empties twice a day. The oysters grow in off-bottom trays and rack-and-bag gear, and are culled, graded and cleaned by hand.
Norman Bloom founded Norm Bloom & Son in Norwalk in 1994, in a family that has been in shellfish since the 1940s, when his father and uncle bought Tallmadge Brothers. The beds lie off Norwalk and Westport behind the Norwalk Islands, and the business is now one of the largest privately owned oyster farms on the East Coast.
Trade notesRun with his son and daughter.
The Madec family founded Prat-Ar-Coum in Lannilis in 1898. Five generations on, it grows cupped and flat oysters over about three years on around 100 hectares in the Abers, fjord-like inlets where the ocean meets river water, and in deep-water parks in the Gulf of Brest and the Bay of Morlaix.
Trade notesAbout 500 metric tons a year.
BeauSoleils grow in floating trays in Miramichi Bay, near the northern limit of Eastern oyster farming. For half the year the trays sit just below the surface; when the ice comes they are lowered into deeper water. The oysters never touch the bottom and take about four years to reach their 2.5-inch cocktail size.
Keith Reid, who founded Stellar Bay in the early 1990s, raises Kusshis in suspended trays, hardens them on the beach and tumbles them again and again for three to four years. Each tumble chips off new shell, so they come out round, smooth and about 2.25 inches across, graded to the millimeter.
Trade notesTaylor Shellfish later adapted the idea for its Shigoku.
Smokey McKeen founded Pemaquid in 1986 with Chris Davis and Carter Newell, and its oysters were among the first Maine oysters on the market. Seed goes from upwellers to floating nursery bags, then onto 18 acres of high-current, hard-bottom leases for one to two more years.
Trade notesSold in cocktail, select and jumbo grades.
Bren Smith, a former commercial fisherman, farms 40 acres off the Thimble Islands near Branford, growing sugar kelp, mussels and scallops on ropes stacked above cages of oysters and clams. He calls the method regenerative ocean farming, and co-founded the non-profit GreenWave to spread it.
Trade notesRan what it called the country's first shellfish and seaweed community-supported fishery.
Mike and Isabel Osinski started the farm in Greenport in the early 2000s, after selling their software company. The oysters hang in purses on cables between pilings, a mix of Australian and Japanese methods, in a village where 1,500 people worked in the oyster trade in the early twentieth century.
Steve and Sarah Malinowski have run the farm since 1981. Their oysters grow in suspension in West Harbor and are tumbled for at least two years before market, and the farm credits the harbor's strong water flow for their character.
Lucky Limes grow off the bottom in the northern reaches of New London Bay, at a site where algae grow so thickly that the shells turn bright green. Some lists place them in British Columbia: they are Prince Edward Island Eastern oysters, sold by Raspberry Point.
Raspberry Point grows its oysters in off-bottom cages on Prince Edward Island's north shore, near the national park, and sells them at about 3.25 inches. The business has been in oysters for more than 30 years and harvests all year.
Trade notesShucking lessons, farm tours and an oyster bar. Also sells the Lucky Lime.
The angasi is southern Australia's native flat oyster, and its reefs were largely destroyed by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century harvesting. In Tasmania only a few farms grow it. It takes 30 to 40 months to reach market and is in season only from late May to September; Blue Lagoon Oysters near Dunalley sells it at the farm gate.
If you farm or distribute oysters and would like us to consider a profile, or to work with us, get in touch.
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