Why a Caviar Company Started in Texas

The first time

The first time I had caviar I was twenty-six, standing in a friend's mother's kitchen in Dallas the night before a wedding. Someone had brought a tin back from a trip and nobody knew quite what to do with it, so we ate it off the backs of our hands with a plastic spoon while the rice finished. I had expected something salty and serious. What I got was closer to butter and cold sea air, and mostly I remember being annoyed that nobody had ever told me it tasted like that.

What was wrong with buying it

Caviar has an access problem that has nothing to do with the product. The category has spent a century selling scarcity: opaque pricing, Russian-sounding names on tins from unclear origins, a tone that makes a first-time buyer feel like they are failing a test they did not know they were taking. Most people who would enjoy caviar never buy it, not because of the price, but because the buying experience is built to intimidate.

When I went looking for a tin of my own, the first three sites I tried listed price on request. The fourth sold me thirty grams of something labeled only "Imperial" for a hundred and ninety dollars. It arrived on a Tuesday in a box that was no longer cold, with no species on the lid and no way for me to know whether what I was tasting was what it was supposed to taste like. I spent more of that evening working out whether I had been taken than actually eating. The product was probably fine. The experience was built to keep me guessing, and I was the customer they should have found easiest to keep.

Why Texas

Cavière is based in North Texas, which surprises people who expect a caviar company to be in New York or Los Angeles. It should not. I live here. Cavière started at a kitchen table in Plano because that is where my table is, and moving to New York for the sake of the postmark was never going to make the roe taste better.

What we can say with certainty is that the DFW area is one of the better places in the country to ship perishables from. Overnight coverage to both coasts is straightforward from here, which matters more than address prestige when the product has to arrive cold.

What we decided to do differently

• Say the price and the species. Every tin lists the sturgeon species, the pearl size, the flavor, and the price per gram. No quote requests, no mystery.
• Farm-raised, always. Every caviar we sell comes from responsibly managed aquaculture under CITES regulation. This is not a compromise on quality, it is the reason the category has a future at all.
• Pack to order. Nothing sits on a shelf. Tins are packed when you order and shipped cold, because freshness is the one variable a seller fully controls.
• Build a real entry point. Smoked trout roe at $19 and starter kits exist so that the first purchase does not have to be a $300 decision.

What we are still figuring out

The honest answer is size. We want to sell a 10 gram tin for under forty dollars, because that is the format that gets the most people over the line for the first time, and the unit economics do not work yet. Cold shipping costs about the same whether the box holds ten grams or a hundred, so the smaller the tin, the more of your money goes to freight instead of roe. We are working on it, probably through a multi-tin format or a local pickup option. Until we crack it, the Caviar Starter Kit is our best answer rather than our final one.

Where to start

If this is your first tin, start here, or take a look at The Caviar Starter Kit. If you already know what you like, the full range is here.

— Christina Lam, Founder of Cavière