Four sites, one partner, one standard.

All four sites are worked by contract farmers, not by us. Sea Life Aquaculture, our exclusive partner, hatches the spat at Tawau, supplies the farmers with it along with the rack and raft equipment, and buys the harvest back. Kunak and neighbouring Bambangan sit on Darvel Bay in the east, Sandakan on the bay of the same name further north, Tuaran on the west coast above Kota Kinabalu. Two coasts is deliberate: the east and west sides of the state do not get their weather at the same time, so a rough week in Darvel Bay is not a gap in supply.

Everything comes back through one place. Harvested stock is purged, graded and batch coded at the Sea Life hatchery at Tawau, then flown to KLIA on the daily morning run, where we take delivery and the cold chain becomes ours. The buy back is the part worth understanding: a contract farmer carries the work, not the market risk, which is what makes the income in this programme steady enough to plan a household around.

The Setiu wetlands are a long brackish lagoon on the Terengganu coast, held behind a sand spit where freshwater draining out of the interior meets the South China Sea. The water is tannin-stained, nutrient-rich and comparatively sheltered.

The argument for Setiu is timing rather than terroir. The east coast of the peninsula runs on the north-east monsoon, a different rhythm again to Sabah, so a quiet season on one coast need not become a gap for our customers. We are not making claims yet about what an oyster from this water tastes like. Everything we sell today comes from Sabah.