Sandbar Oyster Company recently established a new manufacturing facility in Leland’s Gateway District.

The company has leased a roughly 2,000-square-foot facility at 131 Division Drive in Leland to manufacture and distribute its Oyster Catcher product, a structure made of cloth and cement that provides a reef framework for oysters to settle and grow on. The structure helps build up oyster reefs to reduce coastline erosion and impacts from sea level rise, said company co-founder Niels Lindquist.

Sandbar Oyster Company spun out of Lindquist’s research at the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, where he works as a professor of marine sciences. Lindquist collaborated with David "Clammerhead" Cessna, a life-long commercial shellfish harvester in eastern North Carolina, to develop the Oyster Catcher.

The two formed Sandbar Oyster Company in 2015 to commercialize the product, which is made by soaking a plant-based cloth like burlap in a cement slurry.

“We let that work into the fibers, and then we can wet form these different shapes of material,” Lindquist said, “and then we use those different shapes to create oyster reef frameworks, basically a scaffold on which oysters settle and grow.”

After its founding, the company operated out of a lab at the Institute of Marine Sciences before opening a manufacturing facility in Holly Ridge. They eventually realized the location was too remote and couldn’t serve the company’s workforce or transportation needs, Lindquist said. 

That’s when they began looking for another manufacturing site and connected with Barnes Sutton, Leland’s Economic and Community Development Director, earlier this year. Sutton identified the Division Drive facility as an option, toured the facility with Sandbar officials and helped them through the permitting process needed for a commercial upfit of the building. 

The space previously housed a trucking company and is a good fit for Sandbar’s manufacturing and distribution needs, Lindquist said. The facility has enough interior space to store materials and finished products and has an outdoor truck yard that serves Sandbar's distribution and shipping needs.

The company is currently working on projects throughout the Carolinas, Virginia and Georgia and in various other coastal communities across the U.S. Last week, for example, Sandbar shipped several reef structures to a project in the San Francisco area, according to Linquist.

Lindquist said he expects to employ 12 people at the Leland facility and is hiring for several positions. The company hopes to take advantage of the marine-focused degree programs at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Cape Fear Community College to recruit those with an interest in the field.

He also sees the potential for the company's continued growth as homeowners and local governments increasingly favor living shorelines over traditional erosion controls like sea walls and bulkheads.

“We’re hoping that we have an opportunity to grow. We had to sort of bootstrap a lot of what we've been doing and just show that we've got a product that works,” Lindquist said. “That whole process of testing and refining the material has taken a bit of time, but the oysters, they only have an annual growth cycle … so you can only go so fast.”

In addition to building the reef structures, Sandbar also offers shellfish leases. The company currently has six leases in the Moorehead City area, but Lindquist said he's looking to expand that part of the business.

Sutton said he sees Sandbar as a prime example of the type of company the town of Leland is trying to attract. After adopting its strategic plan in April 2023, the town has taken steps to attract companies from six target industries, including life sciences and marine biology. 

“With marine biology being one of our target industry sectors, aquaculture is a component of that,” Sutton said, “and more specifically, the oyster ecosystem is one that was worth exploring for us.”

In the coming year, Sutton said the town of Leland aims to focus on business and retention, focusing on the town’s existing business network and how the town can help those businesses grow.

“That'll do two things. One, it'll grow that base, but then it'll also show other life science industries that there's support for that sector here in Leland,” Sutton said, “but also that there are life science companies that are not just here but they're growing here.”