Sustainable Shellfish Businesswoman: Ahi Martin-McSweeney

AHI MARTIN-MCSWEENEY’S immersion in life as a Puget Sounder began, literally as well as figuratively, a few months after she arrived in Seattle as a new college graduate. “It was a beautiful day,” she recalls, “and my friends said, ‘Let’s go to the beach.’ I said, ‘Great!’ I was thinking: I love the beach. I’m from Santa Cruz.” 

The group of friends went to Alki, that popular crescent in West Seattle on Elliott Bay. Compared to California beaches, there wasn’t much sand at Alki, Ahi recalls. “And there wasn’t much surf, but it smelled just right. There was that salty quality to the air. It still had that comforting effect that you get from being near the ocean.”

She laughs now at the surprise that awaited her in the waters of the Sound. “We went into the water. It was freezing cold,” she recalls with a big, rich grin. “But it didn’t matter. We waded in and dunked ourselves.” As it turned out, that first frigid exposure to northern Pacific waters wasn’t a turnoff for this descendant of Hawaiians and Northern Europeans. 

As time went on, Ahi found herself drawn back to the Sound. “For the first ten years of my adult life, the beaches of Puget Sound have been where I would always run off to, to be alone and think. I ended up spending a lot of time at Golden Gardens [a Seattle public park] in the Ballard area, clearing my head.” In time, Puget Sound became part of her life in ways she had never expected. Ahi now devotes much of her time and her creative energy to giving others an unforgettable taste of the Sound. 

It was two Seattle institutions that brought Ahi to the Pacific Northwest, namely, Starbucks Coffee and the Art Institute of Seattle. She soon realized that art wasn’t her calling and decided to devote her energies to her work at Starbucks, which had granted her a transfer to one of its downtown Seattle stores. Eventually, she became a manager of two of the company’s stores. 

“All of my business acumen I attribute to my time at Star- bucks,” she says. “I learned a lot about people and about man- aging, and about being successful in business.” She was also strongly influenced by the Starbucks ethic of environmentally sustainable business practices, like attention to recycling and using products made from renewable resources. 

As a member of the millennial generation, Ahi was and is plugged in to what’s going on in the world around her. After several years at Starbucks, she spotted an online posting for a job that sounded intriguing—setting up a catering business for a company based in Mason County, at a far southwest bend of Puget Sound. The company, Taylor Shellfish Farms, traces its origins back five generations, to 1890. When the first family members began harvesting tiny, tasty Olympia oysters from the inlets of Puget Sound, Washington was a brand-new state. 

When Ahi saw that job announcement, Taylor already had a long history as an important producer, seller, and exporter of oysters, clams, and mussels; an influential voice for environ- mental sustainability; and a strong advocate for the recovery of Puget Sound and clean and healthy water. Ahi applied for the catering job and got it. As it turned out, the shellfish business became not just a job but also a way of life, and a family. Her wife, Michaela, also became a shellfish connoisseur—and expert shellfish shucker—while working at the Taylor Shellfish store in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. 

Ahi’s job was to build a catering business that helped Taylor take shellfish on the road—and in the air—to events around the region and even across the continent. “We do everything— weddings, birthday parties, funerals. And we do lots of donated events because we’re very involved in cleaning up the water- ways,” she says from the house she and her family are renovating on a gravity-defying street in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood.

Ahi’s catering job even took her to New York City for the Billion Oyster Party, held annually as part of an ambitious project to restore oysters, and oyster-created reefs, in New York Harbor and its waterways. “It’s a unique feeling to take something that is so purely of a place and give it to people to eat,” she says. For some customers, she has been the person who introduced them to eating oysters. “Many times, when people taste an oyster for the first time, they will say: ‘It tastes like Puget Sound,’” she says with a smile. “It’s very cool to be able to hand people that experience.” 

Ahi’s job has given her a keen appreciation for the distinctive shapes, textures, tastes, and smells of all sorts of shellfish: oblong-shelled mussels, smooth-shelled clams, gnarly-shelled oysters of various types, and gigantic geoducks. Over time, she was able to distinguish the different types of oysters from their sizes and shells: Shigoku, Kumamoto (commonly called Pacific oysters), and the tiny Olympia oyster—the only oyster native to the West Coast. “There’s something really unique about oysters,” she marvels. “They take on the flavor of the place where they’re grown. Since water is constantly moving, the flavor will vary from time to time.”

Working in the seafood business has influenced many of the ways Ahi and her family live in this place. “We like to camp,” she says. “We’ve learned that you can harvest shellfish during appropriate times of the year, so we have started to tailor our camping experiences to be near harvestable beaches so we don’t have to pack a bunch of extra protein. We gather oysters, and we grill them with butter and white wine or hot sauce. It’s very, very simple.”

The business also has shaped her understanding of what it means to have a healthy and sustainable Puget Sound. “It means we humans can swim in the water, and things can grow in it,” she says. “If things can grow in it, we can continue to farm and harvest and eat from it.”

Why does a healthy Puget Sound matter? Ahi says, “We need water to survive, right? We should all be focused on being not just good stewards of the land, but also of the water around us. We’re accustomed to doing certain things on land—trash disposal, recycling, and so on. We don’t have those habits formed yet about water. Water makes up how much of our planet? [71 percent, per the US Geological Survey] We need to keep it clean.” 

With the awareness that they have gained from their work, Ahi and Michaela find themselves thinking and acting differently about water. After all, any water that’s used on land upshore from Puget Sound ends up down there, in the Sound. “For me,” Ahi says, “the biggest tangible difference is thinking twice about what goes down my drain.” That includes sink, tub, and street drains. “I’m much more careful about foreign substances: cooking oil, food scraps, what kinds of products we use for cleaning.” 

She says unabashedly that there’s something else people can do to contribute to a cleaner and healthier Puget Sound: “When we eat local shellfish, we support the local companies doing all this work to restore our bays. The more we consumers interact with them, the more they can do.”

When Ahi looks to the future, she is at once apprehensive and optimistic. “What makes me nervous for the future is that we’re going into a period of time when the powers that be may not prioritize clean water,” she says. “It’s kind of unnerving, especially when my life and livelihood are tied to clean water.”

But she is encouraged by increased interest in shellfish and other fresh food from our coastal waters. “Consumers have power,” she notes. Ahi believes they can force change in how we protect life-giving waters. Through consumer choices, business investments, and advocacy by shellfish growers, she says, “We have been able to reclaim some of our waterways and bays.” 

Ahi is hopeful that today’s children can learn the importance of water and healthy aquatic ecosystems like the Sound. “Kids want to save the world,” she observes. “You take kids to a zoo and the first thing they talk about is saving animals so they don’t go extinct. We should be supporting kids and helping them to thrive.” 

Ahi is also encouraged by her own generation. “For millennials, it’s part of our group mentality to want to know where ‘this’ [meaning any particular product or idea] comes from. Information is available to us, so we want answers.” She hopes this will lead them to make better choices.

What is clear to her, and she believes will become clearer to others in her generation, is that “one thing we can do to be healthy is to make sure the water is good so it benefits every- body.” And for Ahi, there is no doubt that clean water must include a life-giving, life-sustaining Puget Sound.