ALL OF A TWITTER

Despite his reservations about social media, lockdown proved the opportune time for Guy Grieve to give it a second chance – and his devoted followers have surprised him

Despite his reservations, Guy Grieve is surprised by the powers of social media

Ilaughed when I first heard about a thing called Twitter. ‘What?’ I thought. ‘You’d never find me using something like “Twitter” – it sounds ridiculous and actually embarrassing.’ No place for a man, I mused. Maybe teenage kids would enjoy playing on it but not me I guffawed.

Nevertheless, more out of curiosity, I joined Twitter when we launched The Ethical Shellfish company ten years ago. I quickly made a huge number of enemies amongst those supporting the scallop dredging sector by bearing witness to what I saw underwater. It became a nasty place as there is nothing worse than men aged 40 plus using social media as we have no idea, unlike our children, how to moderate our tone.

Nevertheless things grew on The Ethical Shellfish page and soon a vibrant little community coalesced around it. Yes, the various trolls still got at me and no doubt pored over the site, looking for ways to stick the knife in and finding plenty of material.

However, I also had some very meaningful communications with fishers and consumers and of course with our growing following of chefs who wanted supplies from a venture that was run by people who genuinely loved the sea and would not ever, on principle, make compromises.

Twitter helped us to grow our market and before the Covid-19 asteroid strike we were sending out nearly 10,000 dived scallops per week. We had proved the Orcs wrong who said we would never make it by insisting on supplying dived and never exporting.

We also began to feel pretty safe from the vagaries of Brexit, reasoning that whatever happened outside the UK our strong home market would support us. In fact, if Sterling dropped that might even benefit us as more tourists would fill the restaurants of our happy chefs, generating yet more sales. Ethical was never a glamorous story of profit but the company supported us at least.

Of course the issue pre-Covid for us was supply as Scottish Government policy regarding the inshore, led by the dead-eyed Fergus Ewing, was to offer no support for the static and dive sector by controlling scallop dredging which smashes up the environment and devalues the King Scallop that should be sold for good money not traded as frozen protein.

Ewing’s inability to see the value in luxury food production which truly benefits remote communities meant that divers and creelers could not expand and even the Marine Protected Areas were being dredged. It was frustrating on many fronts to see the environment continually degraded and simplified, as well as not being able to expand our 100% low impact fishery. That said, we just had to shrug our shoulders and keep holding on.

And then the Covid-19 asteroid struck and we went to zero in three days. Demand was gone. As directors we got no furlough. For a while we did nothing. We were dazed like survivors from a bombed out house.

And then almost on a whim I penned a Tweet asking if anyone would be interested in receiving our dived scallops and ethical shellfish if we delivered to Glasgow or Edinburgh. The message was directly viewed 11,000 times and we received 1,000 direct messages from people who passionately cared about the sea, our brand and of course incredible seafood.

I was stunned. Maybe all of those messages about the marine environment, which felt like suicide notes, had won us more friends then enemies? My two sons were finished with school and were in a no man’s land. Both immediately jumped at the idea of helping us make the deliveries work. And we can actually employ them now. Orders have flooded in and the last two runs have been very successful.

Is this charity or reality we ask ourselves? Either way we are going to go for it and learn the hard way if it is just a bubble. What’s certain is that the chefs who made us what we are will always get supply from us… But this new adventure, started by Twitter, is fascinating and utterly unexpected.

It’s inspiring to see that people do care about the marine environment and want to support those businesses that would rather close than damage what belongs to us all.

Maybe one day Ewing and the other vote-chasers will think again? Or better yet get voted out and their smoke-filled rooms fumigated. What’s certain for me is that I’ll never again laugh at Twitter.

‘This new adventure, started by Twitter, is utterly unexpected ’