by Steve Dollar | January 20, 2025

How Cainnon Gregg is Redefining Gulf Coast Oysters

An artist and musician at the heart of a new wave of up-and-coming oyster farms is not letting anything stand in his way.

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Since founding Pelican Oyster Co. in 2018, Cainnon Gregg has overcome adversity, including Hurricane Michael, the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricane Helen in September. Photography by Alicia Osborne Photography.

As the frontman in multiple punk and hardcore bands in the early aughts, Cainnon Gregg spent his youth slamming full tilt on the Jacksonville bar circuit, a scene blaring in the long shadow of Southern rock demigods. 

“We used to play Freebird (Cafe),” recalls Gregg, of the venue founded by Ronnie Van Zant’s widow Judy Van Zant and daughter Melody. “That was one of the coolest things.” 

It might seem surprising that he’s reinvented himself two decades later as an up-and-coming entrepreneur amid a new wave of Gulf Coast oyster farmers. More punks probably grow up to become CEOs than acute connoisseurs of the much-cherished bivalve who actively pioneer the future of an endangered marine legacy. But Gregg is both. He’s the founder of Pelican Oyster Co., farming alongside an intrepid assortment of budding aquaculturists in Spring Creek, about 30 miles south of Tallahassee in Wakulla County. His oysters are served at some of the Southeast’s finest restaurants and beyond. Find them on menus at culinary hot spots such as Automatic Seafood and Oysters in Birmingham, Ala., The Catbird Seat in Nashville, Tenn. and Peche Seafood Grill in New Orleans.

The term Gregg uses to describe “that ocean taste” merroir, similar to the French word terroir, which describes the flavor imparted to wine from the soil in which the grapes are grown, swapping out the root “terre” (earth) for “mer” (sea). Photography by Alicia Osborne Photography.

“Growing up in Jacksonville, I never even thought about where the oyster was from, right?” he says, reflecting on how his awareness was raised and taste buds aroused after he left home for a peripatetic career as an artist and carpenter moving around the Southeast. While living in Decatur, Ga., several years ago, Gregg was hired to build butcher block tables for a new restaurant called Kimball House that was being constructed inside an old railroad station in his neighborhood. “Of course, I said I could do it, but I’d never really done it before,” he says, offering a kind of life philosophy on a recent morning as he enjoyed a coffee at Ology Midtown in Tallahassee. After Kimball House opened, Gregg became a frequent guest. “That’s where I got introduced to how different oysters could be.” Gregg and his wife, Kiki, adopted a new gustatorial agenda. “We started being oyster tourists,” he says. “Whenever we’d go back to Charleston, or when we’d go to Savannah or New Orleans, it was like, ‘Alright, let’s try whatever.’”

Flash forward to 2018, and Gregg—now living in Tallahassee—gave up his corporate job and was suddenly at loose ends. Aquaculture was starting to take off amid the collapse of traditional wild
oystering in Apalachicola where the world-renowned industry had been decimated by environmental woes, overharvesting, hurricanes and the infamous Georgia-Florida water war over control of the Apalachicola River basin. After initial success, Gregg was faced with almost immediate adversity. Hurricane Michael wiped out his farm, as it did to many others on the Forgotten Coast, and he had to start over again. And then the pandemic hit, knocking the restaurant business on its side. While many of his fellow farmers gave up, Gregg did not.

I touch every oyster that I’m growing. Every oyster that I sell somebody is an oyster I planted, which means that another oyster got to stay in the wild.
—Cainnon Gregg

“He is extremely determined,” says Katie Harris, co-owner of Full Earth Farm, a Certified Naturally Grown farm in Quincy, and Gregg’s friend of about a decade. “He’s a smart farmer and business person and (is) extremely charismatic,” she says, though it wouldn’t mean much if his oysters didn’t deliver. “I’ve had oysters where—I don’t know, they taste like sea boogers,” Harris continues. “I get why people don’t like this stuff. It’s really a weird texture and, if it’s not amazing, why would you? His are so good!”

Pelican Oyster Co. offers two different types of oysters. There are Salty Birds, which are smaller “boutique” oysters, with 2.5 inch shells, and there are Big Gulps. “Big Gulps are my Old Florida oyster,” Gregg says. “I wanted to grow an oyster that was more like the oyster I grew up with. My dad was in the Navy (and) my mom was in the Marines, so I grew up hanging out in Mayport. But we were probably eating Gulf oysters.” Gregg farms in the same water basin as those legendary Apalachicola oysters. “A lot of people tell us they taste like what they remember. We’re 60 miles from Apalachicola. It has that pluff-like taste to it that I think is beautiful.”


Cainnon Gregg wanted to grow an oyster that reminded him of his hometown in Mayport, which led to the Big Gulp oysters. Photography by Andrew Thomas Lee.

And by pluff, he means pluff mud—a term specific to the salt marshes of South Carolina Lowcountry, that can also refer more broadly to the dark brown, sucking glop of grassy estuaries where oysters flourish amid a brackish funk: the secret sauce that reeks intoxicatingly of decay and rebirth.

“When you take care of animals or plants, it’s called husbandry,” Gregg explains. “And the husbandry is what will make the flavor cleaner and maybe more pure. If you let your oysters stay dirty and grimy, then you’re going to get a little more mud and algae in that oyster. You keep them super clean, you’re going to get a little more of that ocean taste. I’m probably somewhere in between. I think that you can’t really change the flavor, but you can change the quality. So oysters are going to taste like whatever the ocean tastes like.” 

The term he uses to describe “that ocean taste” is merroir. It’s similar to the French term terroir, which describes the flavor imparted to wine from the environment in which the grapes are grown. Swap out the root “terre” (earth) for “mer” (sea), and the same concept applies to oysters. “I like to say that they’re almost wild. I try to keep them a little less uniformed and let them get kind of weird,” says Gregg, who grows his Salty Birds and Big Gulps in separate sections of his leased parcel of Oyster Bay. “A lot of the oysters from our area are grown in pretty close proximity, but we’ll see them on menus right next to each other with entirely different tasting notes. My little acre and a half of water tastes different because of whatever’s going on there.”

Pelican Oyster Co. offers two different oysters: Salty Birds, a smaller “boutique variety, and Big Gulps, which Gregg calls his “Old Florida oyster.” Photography by Andrew Thomas Photography.

Ironically, even as Gregg strives to recapture the delicate balance of salinity and sweetness that made a legend of the Apalachicola oyster, most of Pelican Oyster Co.’s business is out of state. “Florida has so much ocean that we are used to very cheap seafood,” he says. “But Florida doesn’t get to eat its own seafood.” Instead, Gregg argues, the best stuff is exported while the home market relies on cheaper (and ecologically damaging) harvests from other states. “I touch every oyster that I’m growing. Every oyster that I sell somebody is an oyster I planted, which means that another oyster got to stay in the wild.” He praises the example of clients like Jacksonville’s Chancho King, an Ecuadorian diner that serves Pelican oysters and relies on local sources for its fish and pork. 


Try Chancho King Grilled Buttered Oysters at Home

“The funny thing is, if we (all) were doing that, the price would probably go down and become more affordable, right?” he says. 

This fall, Gregg plans to step up his direct sale business with bags of 100 Birds or Gulps available for $100 a pop (plus overnight shipping if local pickup isn’t an option) and continue to begin defining the Gulf Coast oyster in his merroir image. “I do it different than anybody in our area,” he says. “There’s no right or wrong way. In 20 years, there’s going to be a standard operating procedure, kind of like when you drive through south Georgia and every cotton farm looks exactly the same. We’re still figuring it out.”

Turns out, Gregg’s youthful adventures on the Jacksonville music scene may have offered a pretty accurate forecast of his adult endeavors, after all. 

“What I think about a lot is that punk music and skateboarding, that DIY attitude and the creativity that comes with those two cultures, have led me and served me on all these different paths I’ve ever been on,” he says. “Because I got really into wheatpasting posters and stuff like that. I learned how to do large-format art, which helped me land a job as an artist. Being creative and learning how to work with what you got is how I figured out how to oyster farm. People are always like, ‘How did you figure out all this stuff?’ Well, I didn’t let anybody tell me no.” 


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