Assessing Consumer Demand

Increasing oyster sales through seafood server training

Project lead – Dr. Bill Walton

Despite the recent expansion of oyster aquaculture in the southern US, lack of knowledge about the quality of these farm-raised oysters and even negative perceptions about southern farm-raised oysters continue to persist, especially in regions outside of the southern US. Over two years, as part of a regional effort in a project led by Oyster South, we are providing trainings to servers in seafood restaurants that serve oysters on the half shell to allow servers to better ‘tell the story’ of the oysters that are served. We will also conduct formal quantitative and qualitative assessments of the effectiveness of this training program to estimate the causal effect of training on knowledge of and, ultimately, sales of farm-raised oysters.

Specifically, we are pursuing the following objectives:

1. Conduct at least 6 trainings in Virginia restaurants and 6 trainings in regional markets (e.g., Washington, DC, Baltimore, New York) with a total of at least 120 seafood food service professionals trained,
2. Quantitatively assess impacts of the training in terms of changes in knowledge and, critically, changes in sales at both the server level (before and after training) and the restaurant level allowing evaluation of differences among restaurants and regions in terms of impacts.
3. Share the specific results of this work with the Virginia oyster aquaculture community about how trainings of seafood service professionals might increase sales.

Potential commercial benefits to the fishing community of this project include a substantial, measurable increase in sales of farm-raised oysters in near (i.e., during the project period) to mid-term. The project design includes an explicit quantification of these increased sales, which could be accomplished through a combination of restaurants beginning sales of southern farm-raised oysters as well as increased sales at restaurants currently offering these oysters. In addition, this project will also serve as the proof of concept of the value of training programs targeting seafood server industry professionals as a means of increasing sales of domestic seafood products in the mid- to long-term.