As the pandemic shut down businesses in spring 2020, the Gunstone family saw bags of its oysters and clams languish, unsold, at their fifth-generation shellfish farm near Sequim. Here, brothers Reed Jr. and Andrew Gunstone and a small crew harvest oysters and clams from the cold waters of Discovery Bay. At the time, Johnson & Gunstone Shellfish sold most of its product to area restaurants. When those dining rooms went dark, their customer base disappeared.
Reed Jr.’s wife, Kyla, wondered if a relationship with a local grocery store could help them through that challenging moment. Markets were still very much open, and more vital than ever. She’d grown up visiting the nearby Town & Country location in Poulsbo, when it was still known as Central Market. Reed Jr. and Andrew Gunstone had similar memories of exploring the store’s produce section and tanks full of crabs and lobster as children. Town & Country and Johnson & Gunstone were both family businesses with deep roots in the region. This idea was just crazy enough to work.
In early 2021, Kyla cold-called the Poulsbo store and ended up on the phone with Michael Fodness, T&C’s director of meat and seafood. He liked the idea of partnering with a family business with a similar commitment to the Puget Sound. Fodness planned a visit to the farm to ensure its environmental stewardship practices were in line with the markets’ mission. “Everything I tried was absolutely amazing,” he says. “And straight out of the water.”
By June of that year, Reed Jr. finalized the logistics of that first order in the parking lot outside the local hospital, where Kyla was about to deliver their second child. “It was a critical time,” he remembers. “Being able to pivot and partner with a local business made all the difference.”
This type of personal connection has served Town & Country well since 1958, when John and Mo Nakata (another set of brothers) and their friend Ed Loverich founded the original store on Bainbridge Island. In the decades since, both the market and its partners have stepped up for one another, says Fodness, to help bridge tough times and survive unexpected challenges.
Direct from Their Tank to Ours
Since Johnson & Gunstone is so close and it runs their own delivery trucks, they bring their oysters and clams straight from their own tanks to the ones in-market without any time spent sitting around in a warehouse or distribution center. Often the person driving the delivery truck was part of the crew that pulled in the harvest from the ocean.
In some cases, “It’s not out of the water for more than an hour,” says Reed Gunstone Jr. “Unless there’s traffic.”
In the past five years, that partnership has only grown. Today, Town & Country buys as many as 500 pounds of clams per week, and maybe 300 dozen oysters to supply our six markets, depending on the season. Live Manila clams and several varieties of Pacific oysters from J&G await in bubbling water tanks (or on ice). Their clams even go into the rich clam chowder available in each market’s soup bar.
Stewardship Through Generations
On the face of things, not much has changed at J&G since Andrew Johnson and his son-in-law, Charlie Gunstone, established the farm in 1918. More than a century later, Reed Jr. and Andrew and their crew still harvest by hand. They even use the same clam fork their great grandfather designed, a modified pitchfork they cut down and weld themselves. They still harvest at low tide, whether that falls at 9 am or after midnight (a schedule that, on the upside, allows flexibility for family time).
But even on a 107-year-old shellfish farm, things evolve. Their father, Reed Gunstone Sr. remembers when Manila clams were a relatively new arrival on Washington’s beaches; now they make up about 80 percent of Johnson & Gunstone’s clam harvest, along with the beach’s original native Littlenecks. Oysters joined the product line in the 1990s.
The elder Reed Gunstone was an early advocate for enacting water quality policies in the region; over the years, the family made sustainability an official priority—yet another way their priorities align with those at Town & Country Markets.
The Gunstones are fortunate to control their own watershed, managing the land directly above their beaches to ensure nothing harmful flows into their shellfish bed. The fields of study Reed Jr. and Andrew sought out before they returned home to run the family shellfish business reinforce the importance they place on stewardship: Both brothers studied geoscience in college; Reed Jr. added a second major in environmental studies.
“Shellfish is an incredibly sustainable resource,” says Andrew. It’s a filter feeder, cleaning the water around it. “It’s not produced on arable land. It doesn’t strip nutrients from the soil. There’s no herbicides and pesticides or fertilizers. Just sun and water, producing an incredible food source.” In short, the healthier the water, the better their crops.
When you grow a product that takes two years to reach market size, it’s natural to take the long view. Both Gunstone brothers know that nurturing the symbiotic relationship between their farm and the surrounding water helps their business, and their legacy, continue. “Reed and I are the fifth generation that’s been on this farm,” says Andrew. “We hope someday that our children will be the sixth.”