Here is the part that does not go in the brand deck.
Day 93 of building a sardine brand, and we do not have any sardines. Not one tin with our name on it. No warehouse, no pallet, no glossy little rectangle of our own. What we have is a spreadsheet, a drawer that no longer closes properly, and a shared delusion that this was ever going to be simple.
Because that is how it started, as an idea. Two of us, way too much confidence, and a plan to make our own sardines. Say it out loud and it sounds almost reasonable. People make things. We would make a thing. How hard could a small silver fish possibly be?
So we did what any responsible person would do
We went to Portugal to figure out how.
We did not learn how to make sardines. We learned something much more inconvenient, which is that the people who already make them have been doing it for four generations, and they are extremely good at it, and the gap between us and them is not a gap you close with enthusiasm.
What we found instead was the work. Rooms of women in white coats and blue hairnets, cleaning and packing thousands of fish a day by hand, every one laid in the tin in the same direction with the same small flick of the wrist. Nobody is watching. Nobody would know. They do it anyway, because that is the standard, and the standard is not up for discussion.
You cannot watch that for an afternoon and then go home and announce you are launching a sardine brand. Well, you can. But you would be a different sort of person than we turned out to be.
And instead of learning how to make them, we ate them
All of them. This is not an exaggeration, it is a confession.
Every brand. Every region. Every tin. Every factory that would let us through the door, and a few that probably regretted it. Portugal in the morning, Galicia by lunchtime, a table covered in open tins and torn bread and a notebook getting steadily more oily and less legible.
Sardines in olive oil. Sardines in escabeche. Bonito del Norte that cost more than the lunch around it and was worth every cent. Anchovies that made us go quiet. Little maquereaux that we fought over, politely, in the way you fight with someone you have known long enough to not really be polite.
We kept going. Recipes. Plates. Way, way too many tins. A cabin bag each that customs would have found genuinely confusing. Seventy cans apiece, and a full blown obsession we have made no attempt to treat.
And somewhere in the middle of all that eating, without ever deciding to, we stopped being two people who wanted to make sardines and became two people who knew which ones were good.
That is what actually became The Salty Club.
Where we really are
We are not manufacturers. Not yet, anyway.
Right now we are the people who have tasted everything so that you do not have to waste six euros on a sad tin and conclude the whole category is not for you. We have had the sad tin. We have had a lot of sad tins. We have also had the ones that stop a conversation dead, and we would quite like you to have those instead.
Maybe one day we will make our own. The idea has not gone anywhere; it has just got a great deal more respectful. When it happens it will be because we have earned it, not because we were confident on a Tuesday.
For now, we are learning about conservas, out loud, in public, with you. You are getting this early, which means you are getting it unfinished. The drawer, the factory floors, the tins that did not make the cut, the ones that did. No shortcuts and no pretending, because the pretending is the boring part and we do not have the patience for it.
Day 93. No tins of our own. Seventy of everyone else's.
This is The Salty Club.
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