Today, Hog Island Oyster Co. will be featured in Google’s latest campaign — with a commercial to be aired during Super Bowl LIX.

“When Google approached us we were like, ‘Wow, really, Google?’” said John Finger, Hog Island Oyster Co. founder and CEO. “It’s been fun to see how many people have picked up on it … It makes us proud. You think about this ad campaign, it’s 50 States, 50 Stories, and for California they chose us.”

Hog Island Oyster Co. began roughly 40 years ago after Finger, an East Coast native and recent graduate with a degree in marine biology and a background in restaurant work, attempted to marry his love of the ocean and his love of food.

“I was a fish guy. Oysters were the only seafood I didn’t eat growing up,” Finger said. “But I could see it even then — as Jacques Cousteau famously said, ‘We need to learn how to farm the seas.’ I thought I was going to farm some kind of fish — striped bass or salmon or trout.”

After an internship in Southern California, Finger was lured to the state by its surfing prospects. He decided to come back and work a job with an oyster company out of Monterey Bay. The experience, however, was not a positive one.

“It was owned by a very big corporation, and they didn’t run it right,” Finger said. “They were trying to run it as a factory when it really is a farm.”

Nonetheless, Finger said he fell in love with the business and the idea of an oyster farm run right, with a commitment to sustainability and to growing excellent oysters. When a chance arose to start his own oyster farming operation in the Tomales Bay came about, Finger jumped at the opportunity.

“I fell in love with the business. I fell in love with environmental connection,” Finger said. “With growing shellfish, you know, you really have to count on a clean, well-functioning, healthy estuary. You have to pay attention to nature, all those things that we really do.”

Over the course of the next four decades, Finger “reluctantly” grew the business from a 5-acre lease in Tomales Bay to an operation spanning 250 acres of intertidal lands. The company also operates five restaurant locations. It harvests and sells over 5 million oysters and Manilla clams each year.

So, how did Google get involved?

“Part of it is, I think especially in the Bay Area, we’ve been around long enough,” Finger said. “We’ve had one customer call us an institution, and I’m not sure I like that, but he also talked about us being part of the fabric of our community, which is better.”

The other part is that Hog Island Oyster Co. was a longstanding Google customer, using the company’s Workspace suite of products — particularly Sheets to manage inventory. Google Gemini has allowed Finger and his team to streamline its processes and focus less on previously labor-intensive processes of ingesting and processing data and more on interacting with customers and farming the best oysters possible.Finger said that managing farms that move oysters to wholesale, distribution divisions and restaurants involves a “ton of information” that has “been really onerous and time-consuming to process” in the past, and Google’s AI tools have helped Hog Island Oyster Co. track trends and better predict demand.

“Technology is helpful, but our model is still based on human interaction,” Finger said. “That’s what I want my people focused on, is that … the day to day, interacting with each other, and we can utilize a tool like this and generate information that helps us do that better and not waste a lot of time away from each other and our customers. That’s what it’s about.”

Finger said they are just scratching the surface of possibilities of using a product like Gemini to analyze information regarding the genetics of the company’s oysters (the company works in collaboration with academic and fishery groups), weather patterns that can affect the farming of oysters and other data-intensive projects.