Riptide Oysters: The small business that has one man dreaming big

More than 500 million oysters are sold each year in the U.S. More than 30 million of those come from Massachusetts. Riptide Oysters are one of many grown and sold there, and they come from the Westport River, a small estuary in the southern part of the state.

Riptide’s are farmed by a lifelong local, Kerian Fenelly. It’s not an easy job but it is, in many ways, Kerian’s “dream job.”

“There’s no days off from oyster farming. I’m constantly thinking about it, my wife is constantly thinking about it,” he told Yahoo Finance when we visited the farm last month.

A self-made businessman, Kerian always knew he wanted to make a living on the water but running an oyster farm came later. After graduating from the University of Rhode Island with a degree in fisheries and aquaculture, Kerian started lobstering.

After six years of long hours and hard work, he was looking to make a change. “We were starting a family, my wife and I,” he says, “and it just wasn’t what I wanted in life. I was grumpy, it wasn’t where I wanted to be going and my income was lower.”

That’s when he spoke with a local oyster farmer who embraced the popular food trend of the past several years - farm-to-table eating. Kerian realized he had the perfect spot for a similar operation not far from his home in the town of Westport.

“I think that’s what everybody in food is looking for today,” he told us. “They want to find out where it came from, how it got here, why it looks like that, why it tastes so good.”

That refreshing, briny oyster starts in a nursery Kerian has constructed along with hundreds of thousands of other oyster “seeds.” The natural tides and currents (helped by the nursery’s pump) bring food to the seeds until they grow big enough to be transferred into a series of mesh bags and then cages, protecting them from predators and keeping them in one place.

Eventually Kerian and his deckhands dump the oysters straight into the shallows of the river where they finish “au naturel.”

Then, when the oysters are ready to be sold, Kerian and his crew dig them back up from the riverbed. They are bagged, tagged and sent to restaurants and fish markets around the country.

The Riptide farm is currently operating in two acres of the river but Kerian was recently granted 50 more acres in the waters in and around Westport. He hopes to continue doubling production (which he did for the first four years he was farming) for another five or six years as the business grows into its increased space.

That will mean taking some of the profit the company is now turning and reinvesting it back into the business. It may also result in nearly doubling its staff from the five deckhands it had this summer -- to ten, eventually.

And it all comes from a trade that didn’t exist in Westport, Massachusetts just a few years ago. “We created an industry out of nothing,” Kerian notes. “It’s incredible and I’m very humble and proud of it. I would love nothing more than my kids and my grandkids to be running this company when I’m old and in a retirement home. I think it’s sustainable. Nothing in the near future is going to change. There will be ups and downs but i think in the long run it will be a family business for generations.”