If you haven’t shucked your own oysters, well, ever, you’re not alone—and this might be the summer that all changes. Especially when you realize how easy it is to prepare one of summer’s briniest delicacies on your own.
New Suffolk-based company Peeko Oysters just launched a home delivery and pickup service, where you can order anywhere from two dozen to ten dozen oysters (as well as a shucking knife and a “Turning Water into Brine” tee, if you want to go all out). It was a quick pivot on founder Peter Stein’s part after he saw business come to a “grinding, screeching halt” in the second week of March after restaurants everywhere closed during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I didn’t know how to comprehend what was happening—the magnitude of it,” he says. Up until that point, his entire business had been wholesale. “After those first few weeks, I thought, ‘let’s try selling these things to people.’ How big of a market is that? I don’t know. But what I do know is that nobody’s consuming them right now, and it’s not because they don’t want to; it’s because they can’t get them.”
It inspired Stein to launch the delivery and pickup service, spreading the news via word of mouth. He took orders through a Google form, before upgrading to take online orders through the company’s website, peekooysters.com.
