 Patty Calzada washes Pacific medium oysters at the Taylor Shellfish Farm on Samish Bay in Bow on Monday. Taylor Shellfish has purchased Fanny Bay Oyster Company, which is based out of Union Bay, British Columbia. |
The deal boosts Taylor’s production of half-shell oysters, which are sold in the shell and typically are served in restaurants with the top half removed, by 20 percent to about 50 million oysters a year and adds about 15 percent to the company’s overall sales, according to a company news release.
“We feel like we can put some more resources into it and expand their production out there,” said Bill Taylor, one of the owners.
Both companies are privately held and terms were not disclosed when the deal was announced Friday. Taylor Shellfish is headquartered in Shelton, but also has shellfish operations near Bow.
Fanny Bay, located in Union Bay, B.C., north of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, purchases shellfish from 50 independent producers.
Taylor, which has nearly 500 employees and also produces clams, mussels, geoducks and shucked oysters on 9,500 acres of tidelands in Washington state, British Columbia and Mexico, is keeping the Fanny Bay label for oysters cultivated in Baynes Sound.
Taylor has bought four other outfits in British Columbia in the past six years and also has hatcheries in Washington and Hawaii, a pearl farm in Fiji and a distribution company in Hong Kong. Last year the company completed a $3.5 million, 22,000-square-foot processing plant at its headquarters in Shelton, north of Olympia.
Source: The Bellingham Herald