What Does the Oyster Consumer Want?

Marketing
Marketing is not selling. Selling is what you do when you bring your catch to the dealer and ask what the price is. Marketing is telling the buyer why your product is superior to everyone else's and naming your price. It is the difference between being the price taker and the price maker. It is hard work and it pays off.

Price
Do not try and compete on price alone unless you can be the low cost supplier, the Wal-Mart of oyster growers. Differentiate your product from the competition by quality, service, packaging, flavor or something other than price.
Demand whatever the market will bear. If you have a high price some people might try it just to see what they are missing. Once you get them to try the product, it is your job to hook them with quality or service. Conversely, if you have too low a price the buyer will always be wondering what is wrong with the product.
If your customers are not complaining about price you are not charging enough. If they are complaining too loudly about price, you probably should be looking for a different customer.

Competition
Do not compete locally. Local competition only drives down price. I cannot emphasize this enough. If growers have flooded the local markets then make a little extra effort and get them out to New York, Boston, Chicago or St Louis.
Too many people selling directly to the same limited number of local restaurants will result in price wars and nobody will be making any money. This happened on the Cape where a few dozen clam growers saturated the local restaurants and their price fell from 25 to 30 cents to 18 cents. No one was big enough to get their product to Boston or New York and they all suffered the consequences. If you can't do it alone, form a cooperative to get your product spread around.
The market as a whole is big enough for all the high quality oysters we can grow, and prices are great, but be prepared to get away from locally glutted markets.
I had a young upstart RI grower steal one of my most lucrative local accounts by coming in 13 cents below my price. If I wanted to I could have stolen it back by coming down 15 cents, just to teach him a lesson, but it would be a pyrrhic victory. Everyone is a looser. I would have preferred that he stole it by coming in with a better product.

Quality overall
This is the key. Set your standards high and work hard at keeping them high. Stuffing a few sub standard oysters in the box to get a few more cents is shooting yourself in the foot. You jeopardize any long-term and hard-fought market advantage if you let your standards slip. Find a separate market (shucked meats?) and separate brand identity for your substandard product or throw it back in the water.
If you have a quality problem (eg. after a spawn) - stop selling! You will have more customer loyalty if you explain that they don't want your product now. If you loose a customer because of substandard quality it is very hard to win him back. This may mean a short term cash flow problem, but in the long run you don't loose sales, you just have to wait until quality is back.

Consistency
This goes to what I said above, but also includes size. Don't put different sizes in the same box. If you have a range of sizes either develop different grades, or simply sort them as you pack them. Variability is not what the chefs want. Some will want small, some large. Find out what the customer wants and fill their need. Customer service is huge. Address complaints aggressively.

Cleanliness
Oysters are ugly, but a little pressure washing does not cost you much In fact it is required (but largely ignored) by ISSC regulations. You wouldn't buy fish wrapped in smelly, dirty paper. Why leave all that crap on the shell? Costs only fractions of a cent to do and adds 5 10 cents to the value. The chef knows he won't have to spend as much time scrubbing and time is money even if he hires low-wage workers. The same goes for the box or bag that you ship in.

Water quality
If you can do some independent water monitoring as a marketing tool you should. It is easy and cheap to do yourself if you cannot find a local lab to do it for you. It does not really mean much since coliforms are only a weak correlate of bacteria and viruses, but pays for itself quickly if you use it as a marketing tool. We found out that we have water quality problems after big rainstorms, but water quality recovers rapidly in our growing area because of good tidal flushing. So we have a policy that we don't ship until a week after 3" of rain. Customers are initially pissed off, but then love us because they realize we are looking out for them!

Shape
As I mentioned above, don't try and sell the crappy ones. If they have boring sponge holes eating away the shell or big barnacles on them, or a reverse hinge or no cup- shuck em or chuck em back. Chefs can't sell these and you shouldn't put them in a position of having to throw away money. Sell these ones to Joe's Clam Shack for a cheap price, or take them home and cook em.

Flavor
There is little you can do about this one. Either you have a good taste or you don't. But if you can have one of those wine snobs come up with some esoteric descriptors (especially a big name chef) these are great marketing tools. If you have brackish water you might consider a salty wet storage system to brine them up before sale. It does not take long and the salt receptors on the tongue are a big part of the sensory equation. Bland oysters are a tough sell in New England.

Freshness
Most customers are very conscious of the harvest date on shellfish. It directly affects how long they will be able to keep the product before they have to chuck it out or cook it up in a soup. Hold your product in the water until the last possible minute. If you can harvest early in the morning and get your product on the truck the same day, this is about as good as it gets.

We pack all of our market size oysters in 100 count bags and leave them in the water so that on delivery day we can pack out relatively quickly and we don't waste a lot of time counting oysters. I am a big advocate of in-water wet storage.

Year round availability
Try and modulate your supply so that you have product year round. Growers can capitalize on the wild harvest closures and summer tourist booms by selling to these ready markets at a premium. The only things that shut me down are heavy ice and spawning (usually in July) which makes the meats thin and watery. Chefs expect year round availability. They hate surprises and don't like to put your name on the menu if they can't have your product ALL the time. If you know you can't ship at least give the chefs advance warning so they can plan ahead. And tell them when you will be back on line! Once you have your name on the menu you have them committed to buying your oyster!
If you can't produce enough to service your clients year round either cut back on the number of clients, raise your prices, or team up with several growers to meet demand. Winning back a customer that may be satisfied with a cheaper replacement is much harder than keeping a happy customer in the first place!

Seasonal markets
Product quality is best in the late fall since the oyster stores up glycogen to make it through the winter, but markets are stronger in summer when tourists flock and strongest in the winter and early spring when PEI is frozen in. Every year I pray for Coastal Canada to ice up so the PEI product is shut down. They have a nice product, but their price is too low.
Once the wild harvest opens up, many chefs will go for the lower priced oysters. These are not the chefs I target! I want the chef who considers quality above price. Usually the wild harvest only lasts for a few months until the wilds are fished out.
By late spring all the wholesalers are begging for oysters, and by August they are desperate enough you can often boost prices. For some reason the whole market seems to soften right when the oysters are at their peak, right around Halloween. Trying to sell volumes into this soft market is always frustrating. A 20% price cut in the fall will not even generate 10% more sales.

Shipping
Getting the product to its final destination can be the most challenging part of the whole process. If you are far from a common carrier trucking firm or airport, you may have real problems in shipping. I can get a box to Fulton's for about a buck a box, but getting it to the restaurant 5 blocks away in Manhattan costs me around $50. Air freight can double the cost of the oyster and you still have to have someone on the other end pick up and deliver the box. Federal Express is exorbitant unless you move huge volumes. UPS ground is reasonable and fast for hauls of a few hundred miles - except during the holidays.

Packaging
Clean, distinctive packaging is money well spent. Inside out onion sacks are for suckers who will take what the dealer is paying. That is not marketing, that is selling. Very different concepts. A small investment here goes a long way and will yield a high return. A nice custom printed box costs about $1.27 each and a custom printed bag about half that. This is money well spent.
It also helps with those cases where you have someone selling their product on your trade name. This will be more common than you might think once you develop product recognition. A little waterproof flyer in the box to remind the customer what he is paying for is a VERY GOOD investment!

Selling direct
Keep in mind that selling direct to restaurants is a lot of work and requires substantial upfront investments. First you have to become a licensed dealer, which means $600 in annual license fees. Rhode Island lets you pack your orders out on your boat and land directly to your delivery truck, but most states have more stringent requirements such as a HACCP certified processing facility with floor drains, stainless tables, bathroom, washdown sinks, etc. You need your own invoices, bills of lading, truck with covered cooler or reefer unit (for interstate). Boxes, bags, tags, computer, software.....
You have calls to make weekly or even twice a week, lots of door to door small sales, invoices and bad checks to chase down, complaints to address. Restaurants open and close at the drop of a hat. Keep your receivables as short as possible. Nothing hurts worse than a customer going Chapter 11 owing you a few thousand dollars. It will happen.
Selling direct to restaurants can make the difference to small firms just starting out because the grower can cut out the middle man and cultivate a few high end customers at 70+ cents. Eventually most firms move to wholesalers for simplicity. I still like to sell to a few local restaurants because I like to make sure my oysters are in a few key high visibility restaurants. I like the instant feedback that the chefs give me so I can correct any problems before I loose sales. But keep in mind that wholesalers object to your selling to "their" customers so it pays to be careful if you enter the market at two levels. I have not sold an oyster in Philly in 7 years because one restaurant tried to go around his wholesaler to shave a few cents. I didn't know it but I was cutting out the middleman and the middle man had lots of clout.

Let's work on quality.
I can't say it often enough. There is lots of room for good oysters in this market. There are over 188 raw bars listed on Manhattan Island alone. If we can improve quality then the market will continue to grow. If we don't then it is our own fault for killing the golden goose.
There are about 300+ varieties of specialty oysters available on the market today. Join the fun! Strong competition is good for the industry, and good for the market.
Note: I never mentioned price as one of the things the market is looking for. Obviously there is a limit to this and many customers will base their decisions on price. Leave those customers for someone else. These are not the customers you want. They don't care about quality and they won't be selling many oysters. If they do buy oysters, chances are they will be using Korean meats, or Gulf Coast junk and you don't want to compete for that market!

A few words about clams -
With oysters it is easy to get a few more cents for your product. There is a range of quality in the market and a range in price. You see 15 cent Gulf Coast oysters and 75 cent New England oysters. You are getting what you pay for!
With clams it is a little tougher. This is more of a commodity. The range in price is much smaller and many more customers are going to be price conscious. Most clams are sold cooked and you loose lots of the flavor differences when you cook them, so telling a customer you have the best tasting or the safest product is difficult.
The notata marking and the farm-raised moniker can bring a few more cents, but nothing like the spread you see between a bottom-grown wild oyster and a cage-reared, cultured "designer" oyster.

Bob Rheault, President, Moonstone Oysters
please do not reproduce this without permission from the author