Admiral Shellfish Company grows prime oysters in south Alabama - Yellowhammer News
Anthony Ricciardone charted his current entrepreneurial course as a gardener. Today, he's a farmer. Oysters are his crop, boutique bivalves that he and partner Chris Head grow in water off Fort Morgan where the salty Gulf of Mexico meets more subtly brackish Bon Secour Bay. A lifelong outdoorsman and fisherman, Ricciardone began by raising oysters off the dock where he lived up in Mobile Bay as part of an Auburn University reef-replenishment project. That led him to explore the commercial possibilities, ultimately partnering with Head to form Admiral Shellfish Company. "I saw the demand for freshly harvested oysters was insanely higher than the supply in Alabama, and all the Southern states for that matter," says the Louisiana native, who moved to Mobile 16 years ago. "So, I slowly scaled out what I was doing at the dock but as a real commercially licensed farm." It is among a dozen or so commercial oyster farms sited along Alabama's Gulf Co