Hog Island Oyster Co.

Hog Island is a shellfish farm, not a grocery slogan. The company’s story: in July 1983 John Finger and Terry Sawyer planted their first oyster seed on a five-acre Tomales Bay lease ^{1 2}. The Marshall farm is the company’s home, where they grow, harvest, shuck, and serve ¹. The Marshall pages give the farm address as 20215 Shoreline Highway, Marshall, CA 94940 ³. That is West Marin, on Marin County water, not a city oyster bar that happens to use the name.

They started with Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas), sold as Hog Island Sweetwater ². Seed is started at a hatchery and nursery in Humboldt Bay ¹. The company describes 160 acres in Tomales Bay and 90 acres in Humboldt Bay, and says it works with five edible oyster varieties in the Northern Hemisphere.

The farm’s teaching word is merroir, its term for the flavor of the bay ². It is a producer metaphor for water and feed, useful as a tasting prompt on Tasting, not a lab result. Raw shellfish belongs to Food safety.

The company also lists service sites in Petaluma, Humboldt Bay, Marshall, Napa, San Francisco, Larkspur, and Tony’s Seafood ¹. Those are service doors, not extra farms. Napa’s public-market door is Oxbow Public Market, while San Francisco is a market rather than the growing water.