G’Day, folks! Well, talk about a crazy Australian summer! Fires, floods and now a pandemic. The last few months have certainly not lived up to the oyster farmer’s dream of an idyllic life on the river!
Thankfully, there is plenty of good news, and with the right approach, I’m here to say that you can overcome one heck of a lot.
Three months of bushfires (and some scarily close calls), were followed by destructive floods, which have in turn been topped off by the ongoing pandemic.
First, the fires caused power outages, closed roads, and forced evacuations. Then floods closed the river for harvesting for five weeks. No sooner had we cleared the debris when along came the pandemic effectively ending all sales and business as we knew it.
98% of the restaurants we sold to were suddenly closed. From getting close to our target of selling 3,000 dozen oysters a week, we dropped to less than 100 dozen in the blink of an eye. It’s safe to say that no one expected any of this and things were certainly looking grim.
Thankfully, use of modern and thoughtfully placed gear meant that we still had plenty of oysters. They’d weathered the fires and floods. Now we just needed to find someone to buy them!
Cue an immediate pivot to direct home delivery!
Within a day of the hospitality industry shutting down, OysterLife in collaboration with Signature Oysters, switched to home deliveries. Shipping oysters direct from the farm to consumers’ homes.
Signature Oysters had the advantage of already having set up an e-commerce platform and an established network of couriers to deliver all over Australia.
Sales are growing, with scores of online orders received since we launched an Instagram campaign on March 17th. We’re now looking to invest in professional social commerce expertise to further build sales. Why invest in something like that?
We have no idea when or in what shape the Australian hospitality industry will rebuild. In these uncertain times, it truly is a case of adapt and survive. It also hoped that once people realise how easy it is to shuck at home a market of private orders is retained and maybe even grown further.
OysterLife and Signature Oysters are now working closely with a seafood supplier. This supplier already has an established seafood home delivery service in Sydney and Melbourne.
We’ve also continued to supply our regular wholesalers, albeit at greatly reduced volumes.
The greatest challenge now is the need to hold an additional 50,000 dozen unsold oysters along with the new crops coming through. The new crops include 80,000 dozen fast growing pacific oysters.
To combat this, we’re installing new rolling basket infrastructure to ensure all existing oyster baskets can be deployed. We expect that the farm’s total of 27,200 baskets will be in the water within the next three weeks.
By adapting and pulling together we’ve not only managed to save the business but have also helped other businesses survive. Of course, we’ve also ensured that the seafood loving Aussies can continue enjoying delicious oysters! They’re pretty happy about that I can tell you.
So, to all our friends and colleagues over there in the South, stay safe, hang in there, and know that you can get through this. You’ve ridden out hurricanes and floods. This is a new challenge for sure but from all of us here in Australia we know you’ve got the right stuff to make it through.
Stay safe.
Ewan McAsh
