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NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — During the week of Valentine’s Day this year, US seafood processor and distributor Fortune Fish Company sold 100,000 oysters.

That’s probably a 25% increase over last year, CEO Sean O’Scannlain told Undercurrent News on the sidelines of this month’s World Aquaculture Society Aquaculture America conference.

He says shellfish demand for his company is going through the roof as more restaurants are putting oysters, mussels and clams on their menus in the company’s market of primarily the Midwest.

Amid demand for shellfish, the industry in the United States is growing, changing and facing challenges.

The US has seen a renaissance in interest in fresh half shell oysters in the last six to eight years as producers take a page from the wine industry in terms of regional specificity, Ian Jefferds, general manager with Washington-based Penn Cove Shellfish, told an audience at the National Fisheries Institute’s Global Seafood Market Conference in Las Vegas in January.

Instead of just labeling product as either Pacific oysters or East Coast oysters, producers are marketing their shellfish by promoting the specific region from where they come, he said.

“Oysters are sold a lot like wine,” he said, adding that oysters taste different depending on region because of minerals taken in when they are growing.

In California, increasing demand for raw shellfish products, as well as demand from China, is prompting expansion plans to intertidal areas because expansion potential is limited in estuaries, where most of the state’s commercial shellfish production already occurs, Robert Smith, senior associate with Plauche & Carr, said at the February conference.

But with that expansion comes challenges in the way of aesthetic concerns from shoreline property owners as well as worries about pollution and habitat and pathogens or biotoxins, he said.

Challenges also exist to offshore shellfish production, he said, noting complications faced by one of his clients Catalina Sea Ranch.

User conflicts are the biggest problems facing offshore aquaculture, he said, noting potential conflicts with fishing, oil and transportation interests.

Other hurdles for offshore aquaculture include costs and logistics with remote sites, security, technology, biotoxins and ensuring that protected marine mammals aren’t harmed.

Over the last ten to 15 years, the shellfish industry has had regulatory advancement, and existing regulations governing the shellfish industry are workable, Smith told Undercurrent on the sidelines of the conference.

But issues that remain are how state and federal agencies interpret their regulations and inconsistencies between federal and state regulations, with one set perhaps wanting something more stringent, he said.

On the East Coast, the farm-raised oyster industry has limitations on leasing, in addition to water quality and temperature issues, Tim Parsons, vice president with Virginia-based Ballard Fish & Oyster Company, said at the January conference.

Jefferds added that hatchery capacity is a limiting factor for West Coast oyster production.

Ocean acidification is also an issue for oysters at the larval state, meaning that water has to be modified at the hatchery stage, which can be a limiting factor at the hatchery level, Jefferds said.

In Maryland, the state has been focusing on making shellfish aquaculture leasing easier since 2009, Matt Parker, an aquaculture business specialist at the University of Maryland, said at the February conference.

Programs have awarded $3.4m in loan funding to 61 projects in ten counties, and the state has issued 116 new commercial shellfish aquaculture leases totalling 2,315 acres since reorganizing the process.

In Washington, Perry Lund, with Washington’s Department of Ecology, who has been working on regulatory reform in the state, noted in February that private ownership of tidelands and tribal rights to half of naturally occurring shellfish make permitting shellfish operations especially complicated.

An increase in Gulf of Mexico oyster production beginning this year could help stabilize if not decrease historically high prices, Hillman Shrimp & Oyster Company president Clifford Hillman said at the January conference.

The Gulf’s share of US oyster production dropped to 75% in 2013 from 89% in 2008, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration data show, with Hillman blaming a decline in Gulf production on hurricanes, the BP oil spill and drought.

Over that time, Gulf production has dipped to 19.2 million pounds from 20.7m pounds, the data show. Production from the East Coast has more than doubled to 5.9m pounds from 2.5m pounds while West Coast production rose to 374,000 pounds from 104,000 pounds.

Hillman thinks that the Gulf is soon to increase its market share, and that should help bring prices down from historic highs even though demand is continuing to increase in raw and frozen.

Between those two categories of products, frozen is beginning to increase its market share compared to fresh, he said. That’s especially true in places like the Midwest were moisture control is important as restaurants often don’t have oyster shuckers like Gulf Coast states do.