On one day, farmers wade out to their wide, open boats under cover of darkness to tend and harvest a crop that has spent the last year slowly growing in the cold water of Tomales Bay. On another, the voyage commences beneath the unrelenting California sun, the smell of low tide thick in the air. Their departure is dictated by the tides, the ocean performing its ritualistic advance and retreat as it has done for eons, washing life-giving brine through rack after rack of oysters on the bay’s tidal flats. An hour to the south lies San Francisco, whose tight streets and rows of colorful Victorian homes seem near, and yet a world away. Growing these mollusks doesn’t require daily feeding or attention; only time, patience and vision, while nature takes care of everything else. When the time is right, the farmers will hoist those heavy bags into the vessels and begin preparing the many thousands of oysters for market, minus a choice few that fall victim to an on-board shucking knife.

These farmers wear the colors of Hog Island Oyster Co., which began in 1983 as a five-acre lease signed by two marine biologists, Terry Sawyer and John Finger. Its origin is humble. As the years went by the company grew, opening multiple restaurants and developing a robust nationwide delivery service. Soon John and Terry realized they were engaged in a delicate balancing act that far exceeded growing the highest quality oyster possible. “Reluctant growth,” as John called it, gave them the opportunity to serve their families, community, employees, and environment.

This conversation with John revealed a man that embraced the challenge of a principled approach to operating Hog Island. He cares deeply about truly understanding an oyster’s role in the natural rhythms of the ocean and addressing its existential threats. He remains committed to serving those who work at the farms, nurseries and restaurants by providing a Bay Area living wage and room for advancement. Through diversification, thoughtful planning and trusted counsel, he and Terry have positioned Hog Island to withstand the squalls of an unpredictable world, coming through a global health crisis possibly healthier than ever before. Using Traeger grills, they have even introduced local, wild-caught finfish to their restaurants, an ode to John’s first love of fishery biology. “We don't get to be sustainable if we can’t stay in business,” a hard truth that he had to wrestle with after laying off nearly their entire staff of 300 people at the height of the pandemic. Due to Hog Island’s success and high oyster demand, many were soon hired back.

Despite years of awards, accolades and success at Hog Island Oyster Co., John believes that he can do better, that there is always room for improvement. Call it the oyster approach; just as they strive to produce a better oyster, they keep growth slow, deliberately becoming a better company with each rise and retreat of the tides.

Jens: Can you tell me about some of the people who work in different parts of Hog Island?

John: For some people, this is a means to an end, but a lot of our restaurant employees are career people. This is the life they want, whether they're a front house server or a line cook. We have a lot of people that have been with us in excess of 10 years, which we're really proud of. It's a testament to creating a good workplace that people like to stay in. Looking at the Bay Area and how expensive it is, we want to make sure this is sustainable for the people who work for us. A living wage is 20 bucks an hour in this area. Forget about 15, we passed that a long time ago. Actually, right now we're at about 25 bucks an hour for a dishwasher who has been with us a while, because we do a tip-pooling policy, where the tips get spread out amongst the staff. Everybody's responsible for the experience and everybody gets to be able to afford to live. At the same time, we're trying not to price ourselves out of markets in terms of what we can charge, but sometimes good food is about spending a little bit more money.

Jens: I noticed on the Hog Island website that there are small selections of fish available, as well. Can you tell me about that?

John: My first love was fisheries biology and I even wanted to farm fish. Growing up, I had never eaten oysters, cooked or otherwise. Then one thing led to another. I love what we do because of the sustainability factor with oysters. But having the restaurants means we are also going to sell fish, and I'm very passionate and persnickety about where we are sourcing them from. We target our fish program on what we can get locally, which means it changes throughout the year.

We don't have salmon on our menus year round; we never have, we never will. We try to get people to eat things like anchovies and sardines because they're lower on the food chain. In particular, we try to get close to the fishermen to make sure we know what we're getting. They are mostly line-caught fish that are extremely fresh and well cared for. We buy the fish whole so we can tell that it wasn’t net caught, and we know that it was handled well. Then, we're breaking down the fish ourselves in our restaurants; in our San Francisco restaurant, we were doing that in front of customers. So much of what we do is about transparency. We want people to see our guy shucking oysters. You can see the chefs cooking the food because we think that's interesting. We've always been about educating people.

Another fun thing has been starting our fin fish subscription box. On top of getting the whole fish, breaking it down, then shipping it out, we’re smoking a lot of fish on Traeger grills. So that's been a really fun and it adds to what we do at Hog Island.

Jens: Can you explain why you chose Tomales Bay for the first farm? What would you want people to know about oysters?

John: Oysters, because they're filter feeders, have a really low ecological footprint and they're also considered a cornerstone or keystone species. We're not feeding them, we're not fertilizing them, we're not using tons of fresh water, so we're growing all this great animal protein using very little resources.  It ticks a lot of boxes in terms of it being a great product to grow. Filter feeders are actually part of a well-functioning, healthy, estuary where you actually need them in a bay to help it function correctly. But if you want to eat them, you've got to have water that's fairly clean. So, for all those reasons, we felt Tomales Bay was a good place.

Jens: Can you talk about the sustainable aspect of growing this business? I'm sure you're walking a fine line with where to grow, adding new restaurants, and adding more different dimensions to your business.

John: Yeah, we have a term called reluctant growth, meaning that if we don't grow to be bigger, we grow to be stronger or better. I never wanted to have a large company, and yet there were inflection points where if we did one thing, then it meant growing to a certain point. In the beginning, just growing oysters made it very difficult to keep our heads above water because the Bay Area was an expensive place to live and do business. The first thing we did was open our farm so people could stop by, and then we did the picnic area where you could sit down and shuck the oysters, or we could barbecue for you.

That really helped change the company and made us a lot more healthy financially. Then we were invited to open up a small oyster bar in San Francisco’s Ferry Building Marketplace and it was phenomenally successful. The company doubled in revenue and employees in a year. For the first time, we kind of went, “Well, where are we going with this?”

We wanted to be long-term sustainable, so we should be growing oysters in more than one bay. We should be growing more than one species in case of disease. Then, maybe we should do more than one restaurant. If we were going to have these restaurants, a certain percentage of the oysters should be from us and we can buy from other farms to have diversity. As we started growing and did another restaurant, we realized we wanted to do another farm. At that point in time, there were a lot of problems on the West Coast with seed production, due to changing ocean conditions. We needed to have some security on our seed production, so we did our own hatchery.

These things became connected one to the other, but we did it really slowly; it wasn’t like we had a plan to open a restaurant every year. It has been more like five years between restaurants. Now we're trying to figure out, what is a sustainable rate of growth? I don't know how big we're going to get, but we're going to be very thoughtful and do it very slowly.

Jens: How would you describe oysters to someone who hasn’t tried them yet?

John: We tell people all the time, if you have an oyster that you like, you remember two things about it. First, you remember the variety. Whether it's a Pacific oyster, or an Eastern oyster, or Olympian. They uptake minerals differently, just like wine. After that, it's what we call merroir. Like terroir, it really is about that place.

Jens: Merroir, being from the sea, right?

John: Yeah. From the sea. The taste of that place of the sea. Look, we've been successful. We do a lot of things to make sure we grow good oysters, but I swear 75% of it is site selection. A lot of it is just really knowing where oysters like to be in the bay and good tidal exchange with the ocean. All these things can really make your job as a grower a lot, lot easier. The oysters wind up expressing themselves in really good flavor. The vegetal qualities, the minerality, all of that comes from chewing the oyster and savoring that a little bit. I think oysters are more about place than just about any other food.

Jens: Ultimately, this all comes down to the future. We want to build sustainable businesses so that we can run in perpetuity. So, where do you see oysters in the future? Are people eating more oysters? Are there trends?

John: I've been in business 38 years now. I have never been able to produce enough oysters, ever. We're not a massive oyster company that deals in commodity markets, but in terms of producing a high-quality oyster, we can never keep up. A few years ago, the talk was about aquaculture, mostly about finfish. There's a role for finfish aquaculture, but we need to learn how to farm fish well. Since fish are cold blooded, the environmental footprint of farm fish is less than a lot of terrestrial animals.

Not all farmed fish is bad. But shellfish are what we call non-fed aquaculture. It’s about putting them out there, letting them do their things with nature. I think people are getting that positive message about shellfish farming. They are truly sustainable and we should be eating more of them.