Some families vacation at the beach. Ours follows the water.
Ian grew up fishing Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. It was the kind of childhood where the fish you caught was the fish you ate, and there was nothing complicated about it. Lauren has been going to Spain's Costa del Sol since she was a child. Twenty-five years of fish markets in Marbella, grilled sardines on the beach, and long dinners that lasted until late in the evening.
Shortly after Ian and Lauren met, they started traveling, and now we've brought our kids. They've been coming with us since they were five and seven, standing beside us at fish markets in Reykjavik and Stockholm, eating grilled fish off paper plates in the sun, learning that food is better when you know where it came from. Now, the tin on the shelf at home is how we keep that conversation going between trips.
Here's the thing about those countries. The people who live there eat fresh fish because they can. The markets are extraordinary. The catch comes in overnight. A Spaniard in Seville or a fisherman in Reykjavik doesn't reach for a tin when they want the best fish experience, they go to the harbor.
But the tin exists for a reason. It's what the fishermen pack for long journeys. What gets stacked in the pantry for Tuesday night. What travels. In Spain and Portugal, the conserva tradition is centuries old, managed by serious craftspeople, with serious fish, and serious pride. It's just not the pinnacle of how those cultures eat fish, but it's what those cultures produce that crosses an ocean.
When we come home from the coast, whether it's from the Nordic seas, from the Algarve, from the Costa del Sol, we can't bring the fish market with us. But we can bring the tin. And over twenty-five years of returning to those places, Lauren and Ian have learned which tins are worth bringing home.
This is why Tide & Tin was built. It's not around a claim that the tin replaces the experience of eating fresh at the source. It's an honest offer: here's the best version of what those coasts produce that actually makes the journey, chosen by people who know what good fish tastes like, and have been going back to find it their whole lives.