ISLE OF MULL SCALLOPS
Championing our most brilliant – and resilient – regional producers. Plus recipes to make the most of these succulent shellfish
Beneath the briny waves off the coast of the Isle of Mull, Guy Grieves’s succulent scallops are gathered by hand
and sold to shellfish-lovers across the country. Today, The Ethical Shellfish Company & Friends is a thriving business. This time last year, however, it was a different story. Having spent a decade building up a customer base of restaurants that included the likes of J Sheekey, Scott’s and Le Manoir aux Quat’saisons, Guy Grieves found that the orders suddenly stopped.
“We went from sending out 10,000 scallops a week to zero in the space of three days,” he says. As Britain entered the first lockdown, and almost every restaurant shut up shop, the demand for scallops dried up. Guy, however, was not about to go down without a fight. “We thought, ‘What’s the power behind these restaurants?’ and realised that, of course, it’s the customers who go to them. So we decided we would start sending our scallops straight to the customers’ kitchens, and give them the same service we’d been giving to Britain’s chefs.” The pandemic had rocked the boat but he was determined the business would stay afloat.
IN AT THE DEEP END
Guy’s story begins a decade and a half ago and follows a circuitous thread. After a frustrating five-year stint in a city-based marketing job, he’d finally had enough of corporate life. So, in 2005, he decided to up sticks to Alaska, where he spent a year alone, learning survival skills. Still with an insatiable appetite for the great outdoors, he then embarked on a 15,000-mile sailing trip from Venezuela to the Inner Hebridean island of Mull, accompanied by his then-wife Juliet and sons Luke, now 20, and Oscar, 17. It was a life-changing trip: Juliet had grown up on the island, making it the obvious location for the family to start a new chapter. They sold the yacht and Guy set about learning a new skill – the art of dive fishing the highly sought-after shellfish hidden beneath the sands around the island’s jagged shores. “I didn’t have much success at first,” he admits, “but I persevered and eventually got a feel for it.”
The difference between carefully tending and harvesting the seabed, as divers do, and the environmentally damaging practice of the dredgers is well documented. Dredge boats drag heavy chains and spikes – ‘dredge swords’ – which dig into the seabed, pulling up all three-dimensional life. Numerous scientific studies have shown that it is a damaging and wasteful method of fishing.
Drawing on his passion for promoting sustainably caught fish, Guy set up The Ethical Shellfish Company in 2010. The aim was to sell his hand-dived haul, together with lobsters, langoustines and crabs caught by fishermen using similarly low-impact methods. Four days a week, wearing just a dry suit, fins, mask and oxygen tank, he’d be in and out of the cool, inky depths for up to 15 hours a day, savouring every moment: “I love that feeling of being enveloped by the sea and every dive is completely different from the last.”
The first year was hard, Guy admits: “I spent most of the day in the water, then prepared and packed the fish before distributing boxfuls to eateries and shops until late in the evening.” He wasn’t only supplying the island but also Glasgow and Edinburgh. And it wasn’t long before he approached London restaurants and hotels. They, too, were won over by the super-fresh catches with their remarkably sweet flavour and firm texture. Soon Guy’s scallops
CHOPPY WATERS
Then, in March 2020, all this came to an abrupt end. “All of a sudden, during lockdown, there was simply no demand. Just like that, after 11 years of the most unbelievably hard work, the orders just stopped.” It’s a story that rings true for many small businesses around the country. For a couple of months, Guy waited to see what would happen, but it soon became apparent that he would have to change his approach. On a whim, he sent out a tweet asking if anyone would like to have his scallops delivered to their doors. He was overwhelmed by the response. “People were incredibly supportive,” he says, and he knew he was on to something.
The next step involved a lot of hard work, made possible by some important team members – Guy’s sons, Oscar and Luke: “Instead of doing everything mainly on my own, like I did when I first set up the business, I suddenly had these two incredible young men.” Another lynch pin of the business relaunch has been Juliet. Although she and Guy are now divorced, they remain great friends and have always run the business together. “She organises us, sorts out the invoices and orders and stays completely unflappable. She’s like the most amazing air traffic controller,” Guy says.
With the help of their shoreman Donnie Morrison – “a true islander” – and veteran scallop diver Liam Griffin, known to serenade customers with sea shanties, they reconfigured the business. Soon they were sending scallops and other seafood to homes across Edinburgh and Glasgow, then countrywide.
Guy’s is a story of a resourcefulness and resilience. And along the way, he’s come across other unique, island-based businesses who share his ethical approach to food production. Which is how the ‘& Friends’ section of The Ethical Shellfish Company was born. Through the website, you can now buy local specialities including Isle of Mull cheese and Stornoway black pudding alongside award-winning seafood. “Of course, hand-dived scallops will always sit at the heart of the business,” Guy says. “They’re the perfect representation of our ethical approach and they’re how it all started.”