What’s next for the oyster that revived the New Jersey oyster industry?

In 1997, Atlantic Capes Fisheries, a seafood producer, partnered with Rutgers University to launch the Cape May Salt farm and its namesake oyster, putting New Jersey’s resurgent oyster culture back on the map. But after more than 25 years of leading the state’s fledgling farmed oyster industry, Atlantic Capes quietly left the business in February, licensing the Cape May Salt brand to the farm’s former general manager, Brian Harman, and his new venture, Cape Harbor Shellfish.

At a moment when oyster farming in New Jersey is finally booming, with at least 41 growers now and more to come, turmoil at this pioneer could be concerning, given that the iconic brand still accounts for a large share of the market — it produced nearly 20% of the state’s entire harvest of 5.4 million farmed oysters in 2023. It may also illustrate the limitations of an industry that aspires to scale, when it ultimately still relies on the artisanal labor of small, independent growers.

Raising oysters was no longer profitable enough to retain in-house, said Atlantic Capes president Barry Cohen. The Cape May-based company’s primary focus is scalloping, with a fleet that accounts for 20% of the wild harvest of scallops on the Atlantic Coast, according to Cohen. “Oystering was a passion and pet project of my brother,” he said, referring to the company’s founder, Daniel Cohen, who died in 2018. “It was never the core of our business.”

It was not, however, for the lack of trying. In 2020, it attempted to industrialize labor-intensive oyster farming with a massive deepwater farm in the Delaware Bay, two miles off the coast from Fortescue. Success would have been a boon to an industry that’s limited by New Jersey’s pricey real estate and the lack of working waterfront compared to New England and Virginia.

With leases for about 4,500 acres in the middle of the bay, and projections for up to 10 million oysters a year, the project could have single-handedly tripled New Jersey’s oyster production — had it not faltered due to inconsistency and technical difficulties of the experimental technology Atlantic Capes invented to automate oyster farming, says Harman, who was involved in the project. The company pulled the plug in January. “We could have transformed the industry,” Cohen said. “No one had ever tried this before, at least in the Delaware … we spilled our guts into that.”

The following month, Atlantic Capes exited oyster harvesting altogether, and handed the Cape May Salt over to Harman.

Traditionally farmed Cape May Salts, however, which are cultivated on tidal flats easily accessible by foot from the shore at low tide, have continued to be produced, with as many as one million sold last year. And Harman, 38, who began working with Cape May Salt in 2010, sees the potential in keeping it going. He promises that the iconic brand — “my heart and soul” — is going nowhere.

What has changed is that the oysters are now being farmed by a handful of independent operators, all former employees of Cape May Salt, in what Harman likened to “a community garden.”

Harman’s efforts have lately been focused on growing his new company, Cape Harbor Shellfish, which also distributes about one million oysters from 10 other small independent oyster farms. Part of that effort includes moving his operation north from Cape May to a new, much larger processing and distribution center in Galloway Township, where there will be a retail center open to the public and he’ll be able to expand distribution for his stable of oyster brands to a much larger footprint.

“Putting ourselves closer to the [crossroads of the] Atlantic City Expressway and Garden State Parkway is going to help us get these oysters in all directions,” Harman says. “There’s so much more to be done to connect these locally grown oysters with restaurants. There’s more demand for New Jersey oysters right now than we are producing.”