2024 Inflation Comes For Your Oysters

Americans are paying more for oysters happy hours.

According to experts, the buck-an-oyster offer is all but dead, with some eateries raising costs as high as $2.50 per oyster.

Oyster happy hours are just one of the many aspects of American life that have become more expensive as prices have risen in recent years. While the US Federal Reserve has made progress in slowing the rate of price rises, inflation has remained persistently over the target, and Americans have been paying more for everything from groceries to rent to, yes, going to their neighborhood bar for an oyster deal with friends.

Inflation Comes For Your Oysters

Wholesale oyster prices skyrocketed to triple-digit highs in 2022 and only started falling late last year. However, according to the most recent Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute analysis, general inflation pushed retailers to hike store pricing to prevent losing money on surplus oyster stock, even as sales and wholesale expenses fell.

Oysters used to be plentiful and (relatively) inexpensive, which made them ideal for pub fare.

“Historically, Americans would consume a lot of wild oysters, and because they were so abundant, they were at such a low price,” said Julie Qiu, co-founder of the Oyster Master Guild, a New York City-based oyster teaching organization. “People kind of anchored their perception of oysters being a cheap food until all the wild oysters pretty much went away.”

While Wells Fargo reports that wholesale oyster prices have dropped from the previous year’s high of $117 per gallon to $88, long-standing supply concerns compounded by climate change may imply that the prices shown on oyster bar menus will not fall anytime soon.

The largest supply issue driving market changes is a scarcity of wild-caught oysters, which industry experts say has been a concern for over a decade.

“We’ve had a number of both man-made and natural events that have caused problems with oysters,” said David Branch, sector manager at the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute. He cited the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a series of storms in Louisiana as high-profile disasters that destroyed oyster beds and drove the business to transition from wild-caught to farm-raised oysters.

Branch believes farms now provide up to 60% of the current oyster supply, an almost complete shift from 20 years ago when 70% of oysters were wild-caught.

Qiu echoed Branch’s conclusion, noting that the remaining wild oyster reefs are a mere fraction of their historical numbers.

“We are really relying on intensively farmed oysters, which means that they require a tonne of labour and personalised handling from people and sophisticated machinery,” she told me. “That is beginning to trickle down the supply chain. It comes into a restaurant, and the business has mark it up by a specific percentage to pay labour costs.”

While efforts to rehabilitate wild oyster reefs are underway, climate change complicates matters.

In addition to rising temperatures, extreme flooding and rain may alter ocean salinity, introduce new predators, or allow new diseases to thrive.

“Climate change hinders consistent growth… “There are just so many things that can go wrong when farming oysters,” Qiu added.

Despite the problems in the oyster market, demand has not slowed. According to Branch, interest in shellfish is increasing, fuelled by Gen Z and millennials eager to expand their culinary horizons. However, he claims that increased demand, along with dwindling supply, is driving prices even higher.

Inflation Comes For Your Oysters

“The industry has been trying to catch up and replace the loss of what we had with our wild-caught (supply),” he told me. “It’s still expanding, but it just hasn’t been as quick to fill the gap with what we had.”

Qiu is aware of the increasing interest in oysters as a luxury appetiser. She remains optimistic, however, that restoration efforts and sustainable farming will allow the sector to increase supply and stabilise pricing in the long run.

“We hope that one day we will get back to that space where you can have oysters as an affordable, healthy protein,” she told me.

SOURCE | CNN