The Business of Aquaculture

The Oyster Blueprint: Sustainability, Branding & Business Growth with Dan Martino

• Lourdes Gant

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In this episode of The Business of Aquaculture podcast, we sit down with Dan Martino — author of The Oyster Book, 50-ton captain, farmer, and co-owner of Cottage City Oysters and Martino’s Seafood, LLC. At Cottage City Oysters, Dan and his team have one mission: deliver the finest ocean products in the most eco-friendly, sustainable way possible — while educating and uplifting their local community.

We dive into:

  • The surprising biggest failure Dan faced scaling his farm — and how it reshaped their entire business model.
  • The strategies that transformed Cottage City Oysters from a simple seafood producer into a premium, sustainable brand.
  • His vision for growth, from partnerships to potential acquisitions, and how he’s positioning the business for long-term dominance in the aquaculture market.

Whether you’re an aquaculture entrepreneur, a sustainability advocate, or simply a fan of a great origin story, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

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SPEAKER_01:

Hey, how are you?

SPEAKER_00:

Nice meeting you, Dan.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, nice to meet you too. Can you hear me okay?

SPEAKER_00:

I can hear you okay. Can you hear and see me okay?

SPEAKER_01:

Sounds great. Yep.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, first, thank you for being resilient hounding me. That works a lot.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I know we're all busy. So did you move or traveling or?

SPEAKER_00:

Both. I moved first and then I was traveling and just life, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, but thank you again. Um, I like that you follow through quite a bit. So that really works for me because I'm mobile all the time. So that works. So thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm excited to pick your brain a little bit.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh my goodness. I don't know if there's some left right now, but we'll see what we can do. So I don't know how you found me through Instagram. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I found you through Instagram and listen to the podcast and just, uh, Love what you're doing and the platform that you're in, the spotlight you're giving to the whole industry. It seems like you're very ahead of the curve or ahead of the wave, so that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I got a lot of mentors. Okay, so you know how the podcast works. You've probably done some of them before, but I can't wait to hear about your story. I look at your website and obviously the book. And so it'll be the same. I'll have a little bit of an intro, what we're going to be talking about, a little bit background about you and your company, and then we'll do the three questions and we should go from there and then have fun with it for sure. No questions that I'll ask that you'll not know just because we're going to be talking about you and the company. and then you'll know that I'm wrapping up when I say you know my biggest takeaway is yada yada and then I will ask you how they can get in touch with you feel free to give your website even your phone number or email if you feel comfortable and anything that you'd like to announce from there on okay

SPEAKER_01:

that sounds wonderful thank you

SPEAKER_00:

okay sounds good okay and again if you need to want me to edit some portion you just tell me oh can you edit that my editor can just do that and then we can go from there yeah okay Okay, sounds good. Here we go. Oyster farming, unique method, and more. That's what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. Welcome to the Business of Aquaculture podcast. This episode, I'm so excited to have Dan Martino. Welcome to the show, Dan.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I love it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

My pleasure. So Dan is the author of The Oyster Book, 50-ton captain, a farmer, and co-owner of Martinez Seafood LLC, Cottage City Oysters. Welcome again to the show, Dan.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00:

So Dan found me on Instagram. So it was quite fascinating actually how he followed through. So for those of you who is like me, who is on the go all the time, please remember to follow through. I do appreciate him doing that because now here he is on the show. So just to give you a little bit of background on what they do at Cottage City Oysters, I love that they're very transparent on their mission there on their website. So their mission is really simple. Provide the best ocean products in the most eco-friendly, sustainable, They strive to do this while providing education and support to their local community. Surprisingly, they believe that the eco-friendly and sustainable part is the easiest. Oyster farming is a very organic practice in and of itself. Welcome again to the show, Dan.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

So let's get the show rolling. So maybe I get started with the hardest questions first. So what was the single biggest failure you faced scaling Cottage City Oysters? And how did that failure directly shape your revenue operations model today?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, we've had way more failures than successes. And I think that's the ultimate goal to our success, right? Is that we're not afraid to fail. And in fact, we've created a business model that encourages experimenting encourages those failures and then encourages trying to learn from them right so my brother and i started the farm uh in 2014 it became incorporated and that's when we actually started the business but you know my background was tv production and advertising and marketing and my brother's background was a finance guy and um you know doing corporate finance and so um you know i found oyster farming through filming a tv show about it i i got to filmed the Billion Oyster Project a year or two before it even started in New York. And so I just was highly inspired by that and came home and talked to my brother about it. And he became highly inspired by it. And we kind of just dove into oyster farming overnight. So with no background or experience, you know, fishing experience or boating background or farming experience, you know, there was a lot of mistakes. So it really has been kind of a trial by fire way of learning. And I would say that just knowing, you know, we had a good mentor, Jack Blake in Eggertown, he had an oyster farm, and we worked with him for about a year before we actually got our farm. And The best advice he gave us was just to start small and move slow, because we were going to kill every oyster we had, and we were going to have to figure it all out the hard way. And so, you know, I can't really necessarily point to one giant failure, but I could say that all of them have been learning experiences. And so that's kind of been the most valuable thing for us.

SPEAKER_00:

That's amazing. I like your story about it's perfect combination. You got the marketing background and then you have a finance guy, but then you didn't have the technical guy. And then obviously the winning formula there is having somebody who's already done that, which was your mentor. And so I mentioned at the top of the show about unique method. When I went to your website, i love that you guys are very also vocal about the farming process that you do so maybe and i like that about you guys because a lot of small to medium businesses normally cannot pinpoint what is their unique ability i'm using terms from the strategic coach a unique method is something that you have as your own that you can have intellectual property on and obviously unique ability meaning the only one talent that you guys do really well so because you're not just farming oysters from what i saw in a very that i've seen you're you actually built this brand so maybe tell our audience what strategic moves did you make the position cottage city oysters as more than a commodity and into mostly a premium sustainable brand because you guys also market on martha souvenir which is a great ending

SPEAKER_01:

yeah and thank you and i think a lot of it was um again it was that Taking it slow, the outsider perspective, a lot of intention about what we were trying to do. We knew that the water quality and the site that we had picked was some of the best in the world. We knew it was special. And then it kind of became a goal of, not just going out and celebrating that because if it comes from us, it's less important than if it's coming from other people, outside voices and outside opinions that agree with our opinion that this is a very high-quality site. But before we even got to that, it was this... Even starting the farm, we faced so much opposition from... local politics or local fishermen or whatever it might be. My brother and I being outsiders and not really embedded in the good old boys club of New England fishermen. So we had to actually, and then we did not have a model of what we were trying to do to be able to point to and say, hey, this is what we're trying to do because we were largely kind of creating it as we were going. Yes, we had a mentor and we were trying to copy what the Agritown guys were doing, but we were doing it in the open ocean in a completely different environment and a completely different way. And so we just felt that the transparency, making that a high priority from the very beginning was our best way into this industry, right? And so we started by doing educational speaking sessions at the high schools and at the town level. about how we were going to farm this and the good that this would do for the economy and for the environment. And really kind of had an open door policy from the beginning of this is how we're going to grow the seed. This is how we're going to grow the market oysters. And we joke now on these tours, these tours, we've since made them public and it's a big part of the vineyard tourist community. People from all around the world come to Martha's Vineyard and they jump on our oyster farm tours. We specifically kept the oyster available only on Martha's Vineyard. We're really trying to support not only the local economy, but like you said, build that exclusive brand. And so now that with the tour sold out, we still show how we do all of this. The nursery boxes that we've created or the seaweed lines and the muscle ropes and all the different things we're doing. And we joke that it's all copyrighted, but... you know, none of it's copyrighted, right? It's just, it truly is one of these things that the environment that we're growing in happens to have very deep water. It's able to catch these wild mussel sets and support the seaweed growth that we do. So it's unique. And so, but I think every farm is unique. I think that's one of my biggest message in the book, at least, is trying to compare the wine industry to the oyster industry and vice versa and and how some people gravitate towards red wines, which could maybe be like your, you know, Japanese varieties of oysters, or some people like white wines, which would be your Crassostria virginica variety, right? And so there's these different, completely different species. And then within, you know, the East Coast oysters of America, you have your different types of white wine, right? One's like a Sauvignon Blanc, and one's like a Pinot Grigio, and our oyster is like one of those, and another oyster is like the other kind. And so it's, It's celebrating all of those differences. And in this industry, like the wine industry, every producer has that unique story. They just have to figure it out, right? What makes them unique? Wow,

SPEAKER_00:

that's a lot of amazing nuggets there, that in just one answer that you gave me. And I love that you did this on celebrating the differences, because I know from my experience from our hatchery, like one client of ours, actually one of our biggest clients and also partners, was focusing on Komamoto oysters at that time. But at that time, we weren't actually producing that, but because they requested for us to actually produce that. So we had an up finding out, obviously it's harder to make than what we're used to, but now we knew how we're going to pivot in terms of okay if there's some exclusive request of what kind of oyster they want us to produce we can actually take a look into that but you got it deeper into you know comparing it into another industry like the wine industry and it got me thinking in terms of my next question actually is one of your vision for growth actually to rebrand from seafood to food and beverage because that's the trajectory that we're doing in our company because maybe you're structuring your partnerships and distribution or maybe even potential acquisitions to create a dominant position in the aquaculture market? Have you thought of that?

SPEAKER_01:

No, that's, I mean, that's super interesting. We haven't thought, unfortunately, we haven't thought deep enough about it. We've, on the shallow side of thinking, we view the industry that there will be, you know, there will be table wines and there will be Louis Vuitton type bags, right? Like there will be select brands that end up the cream rises to the top, so to speak. So we do see that happening. The honest truth is that we haven't scaled to a size large enough yet where we're thinking about truly exporting our product away from the vineyard. And so being on Martha's Vineyard, and it's this very exclusive, beautiful place, there's a large market here. First and foremost, we plan to just continue to tap into as much of this market as possible. Our hope is that through the brand awareness and the quality and the stories that we can create, it'll be Michelin star type restaurants that we end up exporting to when we eventually do. But it's a challenge, right? I mean, I would love to hear your answer on that. Like, where do you see the industry going? And is it a food and beverage space? Or the other vision is, right, some brands end up becoming commodities almost in a sense for fish foods or chicken proteins or poultry feeds. And you almost could have these farms that are not quality products, but they're so productive and quantities are so large. that they could support almost all these other industries, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's a good question. And my answer to that is actually very... What's the word? Depends on where you wanted to go. I don't know if you know the book Small Giants. And we're going to talk about your Oyster book in a while here. But there's a book called Small Giants wherein family firms like us can... actually just stay the way we are because we love what the brand that we built for ourselves it can be a boutique like our hatchery was a boutique hatchery wherein we just you know provide all these oyster seed to our local growers and then they make it to market size and then of course there's the you know the bigger game in aquaculture wherein if you're a small to medium aquaculture enterprise and you're not able to scale because you just hit the wall that you're the baby has done grow to a teenager and you really wanted to make it bigger then you really need a partner to be able to grow it to a size we're in you know it can be like somebody bringing on in our case a seafood palette we're in, we can just offer other seafood like lobster, not just our geoduck and oyster. So it just depends on where you see you want it to go. In our case, it was inevitable that we have to partner up for a merger to be able to scale. But not all families are like that. If you read that book I mentioned on small giants, there were some people who declined mergers and acquisitions because they wanted to maintain their family brand. And that's a different compared to if you want to partner up with somebody who can scale you, right? So the goal that we have is to be a$5 billion aquaculture food and beverage. That's another pathway, too, wherein maybe there's already an existing partner that you have. In your case, you have the opportunity to partner up with Martha's Vineyard. Then the question then, does Martha want to acquire your oyster brand? Because I wanted to talk to you about that, actually. Maybe talk to us about your oyster book and the Merloir brand.

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. Um, so the oyster book came out of my obsession with this industry, right? And my obsession with storytelling and, um, you know, just, just the desire to be as good as I could be at, at farming oysters leads you down the rabbit hole to learning who the first oyster farmer on planet earth was and how did the French do it and how did the Japanese do it and how does, you know, how does the West coast do it? And, um, And then with the public tours, I host those with the public and they're always asking questions and I always feel the need to have the answers to those questions, right? If somebody says, well, you do it like this on Martha's Vineyard, how did they do it in France? And well, I should have the answer, right? This is part of my job. And then COVID hit, not 2020, 2019. And I find myself, the tours are kind of, not around, everybody's scared to go outside and do public activities. And I basically wrote down all of the information that I had kind of figured out over the last decade doing this. And I think a lot of it was in an attempt to not lose that information because I wasn't regurgitating it on these tours every week. But another part of it too was to basically organize the thoughts of what I had and continue to research more into how this industry operates and the history of this industry and where it might be going. And then before I knew it, I had a 300-page book written, and I realized, oh, this is bigger than just the ideas in my head. This is actually a chance to tell the story of this industry today. And not from just the American perspective, right? But the French perspective, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Australian, every perspective who's involved in this industry. And believe it or not, I put it out there to a couple of publishers and AdGate Publishing was my number one pick and they loved it and bid me a deal. And now I got a published book. But the best part of it The sole intention of it was to tell a great story, the history, the future. But a lot of it that I'm happy to see that came to fruition is that universities are now using the book as required reading for their aquaculture classes or their environmental studies classes, because it really is one of the first true dissections of this industry around the world and how it operates and how it specializes. And then to put it into Meroir's perspective, that's actually the kind of book I'm writing about now is about Meroir and the history of this and where is this all coming from. And it's such a topic that's ripe for discussion. This is a concept that goes back to ancient Rome. They had the concept of Meroir that some fish tasted better from certain parts of the ocean and the same fish from a different part didn't taste as good. But the ocean is so remarkably complex, right? We don't know what nori tastes like compared to kelp or Gracilaria or Olva. There's never been a book written about the different seaweeds and their intrinsic taste values, right? And so before we start to talk about even what certain fish or oysters taste like, we should even start to look at what do the different seaweeds taste like and try to break down those flavors into descriptive words before we can try to even figure out what's happening with the oyster farms. And I'm in way too deep right now, long story short.

SPEAKER_00:

No, it's great. It's great because I haven't seen anyone so passionate about all this from a branding perspective as well and storytelling first and foremost. I think if there's one thing, as you probably heard in some of the episodes, one of the challenges our industry have in aquaculture is the storytelling part. So I am so pleased to be able to hear that your company is doing this very well done, very well done, very well deserved to be highlighted on the show. So that's why I thought this is such a great story of a company who doesn't even have a technical background in aquaculture, but did an amazing job in terms of storytelling and branding. So maybe you can get in touch with our audience later today. And then I can't wait to actually get my hands on your book because I can't wait to read what are the other stories in the little snippets that I've known about you and your website. So my biggest takeaway from our conversation is really when you were talking, Ebeo, you know, the differences between what would be like if, you know, people like red wine and so another person likes Kumamoto oysters, white wine can be compared with another type of wine. So I like that analogy because not a lot of people actually know this about our industry. In my case, actually, before, I don't know if you know, you probably listened to some of the episodes on my show, I talked about how we actually grow our geoduck king clam shellfish for 10 years. And at the start when we were fundraising, everybody would be like, why would I invest into something that will not make money for 10 years? But you know, the whiskey industry is the same, you know, even the lid of the wine actually takes nine years to grow. If people know about this, about the industry. So how can our audience get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So the company is cottage city oysters. So cottage city oysters.com email at info at cottage city oysters.com. I have, You can look up the author book, danmartino.com, and that's where my books are and information about what I'm writing now. And goodreads.com, I'm on there as an author. And so it's really good. I would love, you know, really the biggest optimism for this industry, right, is the future. I mean, we all, you and I, I think, know more than anybody that this is the future of food. Like there's, you know, the Western way of growing corn and wheat and, And even rice and shrimp farming is going to be very difficult, but it's like the blue ocean farming of shellfish and fish is going to be the largest contributor to our food supply in the future. And so like the more people that get in on this wave now, the better, you know.

SPEAKER_00:

Sounds great. Well, thank you so much for your time, Dan. And I really appreciate you connecting with me. Please remember to review the show and see you next week. Remember, you help build a home in the Philippines every time we launch an episode. Thanks, Nan. Thanks, everyone.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.