This article is from the spring 2026 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Caine O'Rear | Photos by Courtney Mason
“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” — ISAK DINESON
It is just grainy light outside and Trey King is trundling his cart across an empty stretch of beach toward the water. In the cart are several five-gallon buckets that he will carry into the Gulf to harvest sea water, for the purpose of making salt. It is cold on this January morning and the beach is quiet. A few birds that look like sandpipers are milling about in the foreshore and a snowbird or two lurks in the distance. Reports of a great white shark moving through the area surfaced days ago but, for now, the twelve-foot tourist is nowhere to be seen.
On this raw winter morning King is decked out in waders and ball cap and he looks like a man ready to work. For the past year he has come to this spot in Gulf Shores twice a month to collect the raw materials for his trade. In the next hour will make a few trips from the water to his trailer, which is hitched to his truck in a lot at the intersection of 59 and 182, next to The Hangout. When he started this gig in late 2024, King would haul the buckets back by hand — but he quickly learned he was making a rookie mistake. King is in his early 30s with a rangy, athletic build, but even the fittest of sorts needs wheels for this gig — those buckets get heavy.
By the time he enters the Gulf it is lighter out and the joinery between sea and sky does not show. The muted greens and blues are bordered by the whites of clouds and beach, and the calming hues resemble a painted scene from a dentist office. The party-vibes this stretch of beach is known for are nil at this hour.
Before heading into the water, King is careful to make sure it’s light enough to see. He has a family and will not abide any safety risks. On this morning the Gulf looks tranquil, but as someone who grew up on the Eastern Shore, he knows about the subtleties of rip tides and the need to respect the authority of the sea.
“Sometimes I go out there and it’s pretty sketchy,” he says. “But I got kids. I gotta be careful.” This is an ideal time to harvest, he says, because there are no swimmers at this hour. That is important because even the faintest trace of oil-based sunscreen can taint a sample and render the water unusable. King also doesn’t harvest after rainstorms, which can yield runoff and create a host of problems.
“There have been times I’ve gone into the Gulf and the water looks like bottled water,” he says. “There have been other times when it is not that clean. That is where environmental stewardship comes in. I put a lot of credence and faith into the Gulf, but there is also the saying ‘trust but verify.’ I need to make sure I’m providing a consistent product. And part of that consistency comes with making sure my source is as reliable as possible.”
The Biz
Ever since word got out, the demand for King’s flakes has been strong. When I first meet up with him, the company’s back-orders are north of two hundred and the local foodies are clamoring for more. His is the only salt of its kind in the state and his product has been championed by Sweet Grown Alabama, a nonprofit that promotes home-grown Alabama products to consumers.
Coverage in the local press has also helped. By the end of March, the company expects to have all back-orders fulfilled. In a few months, they’re hoping that consumers can just “click-to-purchase” without any extended wait-time. “We’re getting there,” he says, “but it’s a crawl-till-you-run kind of thing.”
King has a full-time career as a software sales consultant, but this newfound jones for salt-making is no side gig. Right now the company is licensed to sell direct-to-consumer, with the goal of eventually scaling the business to retail commercial levels. “Anyone can make homemade salt, but to do it well for a scalable business, well, that’s another story,” he says. “This is not a ‘lifestyle’ business.”
King is driven, obsessive, and technical, a sort of mad-scientist type. He is also the kind of person who, when he gets into something, goes all the way.
And he has gotten into salt-making.
“This is a very technical process,” he tells me in the parking lot as he loads the water-filled buckets into his trailer. “Just like with cooking, or any type of process using natural-based ingredients, less is often more. In five years, I think this will look very different. But for now, it’s a real low-code type of thing, which is partly by design, partly by constraint.”
In the back of King’s trailer sits a multi-part filtration system. He filters on-site after harvesting, with the hope of getting three to five percent salinity. The process takes about thirty minutes and ends with activated charcoal filtration. The system is proprietary, he says, and designed to preserve the natural mineral balance while also getting rid of impurities.
But it’s about more than technique and process; it’s about history, too. Before long, King is waxing about the story of salt in our region, taking us back to the antebellum South in the days before refrigeration. The talk drifts to something called the Alabama Salt Commission, a Confederate agency in Clarke County that managed the distribution and price of salt for the state’s citizens in the 1860s.
“Back then, salt played a very different role for the American public,” he says. “It’s how we cured and stored all of our meat. I travel and hunt in Alabama, and I’ve forgotten it at times and can’t make jerky.
“For a Southerner, before 1900, the two most important things were coffee and salt,” he continues. “Coffee we can go without, we can survive. But salt is really, really important. That was one of the first things the Union troops plundered at the Battle of Blakeley, all of the salt works.”
King grew up on the Eastern Shore in Daphne, the son of a police officer. After college in Tuscaloosa, he headed west to work in Silicon Valley for a stint. Like a lot of locals who have ventured further afield for career pursuits, he is glad to be back in the Deep South, having missed the welcoming nature and sincerity of its people.
“I had a little bit of a reckoning with where I am from, about having a sense of pride for being from here, because for a long time, I didn’t,” he tells me matter-of-factly. “In San Francisco, I didn’t exactly volunteer that I was from southern Alabama, because it has a lot of negative connotations. But now I say it ‘loud and proud.’ And even with our brand, there isn’t anything more Southern, as far as I’m concerned.”
The Process
Fairhope Salt Operation is currently a family affair of two. Trey handles the manual labor and technical stuff, while his wife Gabrielle oversees the marketing and order fulfillments. The two met at the University of Alabama, where Gabrielle rowed as a member of the crew team. She has suffered some spinal injuries and is not able to do any of the physical work that comes with making salt, but she has certainly made her imprint on the brand’s aesthetic.
“My wife has done an incredible job with our branding,” King says. “It all gets done by hand.”
In early February, I pay a visit to King’s home in Fairhope, where he’s built two greenhouses on his property. It is hot and I regret not having worn shorts. But this Indian summer day is good for the greenhouse, good for the salt. It means faster evaporation and less time to get the product in the hands of customers.
After the water has gone through the filtration process, the concentrated brine is put on shallow trays and shelved in one of the two greenhouses. Between 90 and 100 ounces of sea water can fit into one of these trays, and King is trying to fill each one so that the water is rounded without spilling over. Each tray can yield a two-ounce container of flakes, a single-unit of purchase.
It takes about an hour to fill the 70 trays, and there are usually 200 or so trays working between both structures. If he starts wholesaling, he’ll definitely need more greenhouses.
As for the evaporation process, it can take anywhere from seven days to two weeks. “Right now, you see the bubbles on the bottom of the tray, that’s evaporation,” he points out to me.
Once the crystals begin to form in the tray, they are monitored closely by King. At this stage they can appear as delicate flakes, or sturdy grains. When it gets to that point, he puts a lock on the greenhouse and won’t go in.
“It almost looks like an oil slick, a shiny film,” he says of the water at this stage. “That’s where you see the mineralization starting to happen. Once you start to see that, we’re getting to the point of concentration. If you break that up, you’re not going to get any flakes, because that’s what forms into your flakes later as the sodium is starting to collect. That is how Jacobson does it and how I learned it, from watching some of their videos.”
Once the crystals form, they are harvested and sorted by hand. This part of the process is carefully cultivated, and much attention is paid to selecting only the best flakes for the jar.
“For quality control, it takes time,” King says. “We have systems where we’re scaling better and getting faster, but there’s still that bottleneck. It only goes as fast as two people can pick through a jar. The salt, thankfully, keeps us pretty damn honest. If there was anything in there, you would know immediately. We’ve got a pair of tweezers and a really big light. If there are issues, there will be one more quality-control phase. We’ll pour it out and do it again and make sure no one’s getting a fly — that would be disastrous for us.”
For his last batch, King says he ran into a couple of screens after letting the flakes sit and dry out a bit. “The last batch I tasted, it was too salty,” he says. “There was too much magnesium.”
Taste of the Sea
“I had no idea what to expect,” says Peggy Hadley, a Daphne resident who stumbled upon Fairhope Salt Company after reading about it in The Baldwin Times. “But I was just so interested. I had no idea you could even do such a thing. I always just thought that salt came from a mine. Everybody knows that the ocean and the Gulf water are salty, but who would have thought that you could have derived this.”
To say that Hadley is a satisfied customer is putting it mildly. Today she uses the Bay Blend or Fairhope Flake on just about everything that comes out of her kitchen: seafood, brownies, even craft-cocktails. “The Bloody Marys, oh God,” she gushes.
As someone who lived in New York for years, Hadley says she used Kosher salt as her go-to seasoning for years. But that’s all in the past — it’s the local flakes from Fairhope from here on out.
One of the things that impressed her most about Fairhope Salt, she says, is the first-rate professionalism of the product. The presentation, the layout, the branding; for her, everything about the company is superb. The containers even carry a scriptural line from Matthew that reads You are the salt of the earth.
And Hadley digs that it is a home-grown operation, all the way from the top-down.
“I like the fact that it’s local and run out of their home, and they often talk about how it’s a cottage industry,” Hadley says. “It makes a great housewarming gift. It’s got recipes in it, the story of their company, and how they process it.”
Those recipes include “Bay Blend Gulf Shrimp,” “Bay Blend Tomato Toast,” “Gulf Fries,” and “Brown Butter Sea Salt Cookies.”
Hadley says she uses the spice-complemented Bay Blend on her seafood, opting for the Fairhope flakes on the brownies and Bloody’s.
Another customer, Stacy Malone, discovered Fairhope Salt Company through an article in Mobile Bay Magazine. A resident of Lucedale, Mississippi, she and her family have been vacationing in Fort Morgan since she can remember. She says she buys local vegetables and home-grown products whenever possible, so having Fairhope Salt in her kitchen was a no-brainer. After reading the magazine profile, she went to the company’s website and ordered a batch. King emailed her a short time later and said the weather had created delays, adding that he did not want to deliver a product of inferior quality. They got the Bay Blend and Fairhope Flake in January; but for her, it was well worth the wait.
“Meeting Trey was really nice,” Malone says. “He was so excited and committed to what he was doing. The jars are labelled so nicely, and his wife has done all this care to present it well. I was so impressed by him and it made me want to support them. I’ve already recommended it to other people on the wait list.”
The Finish
King has fond memories of swimming in Mobile Bay as a child. He hopes that one fine day he can harvest water from the shores of Fairhope and create a salt that does his home waters proud. He is aware of the salt marshes that have long existed in Mobile Bay and is keen to learn more. There is one huge marsh that sits along the western shore of the Bay, known as the Deer River salt tract, which spans almost 300 acres and is rich in habitat. In the Mediterranean, and in parts of France, the farmers harvest salt from these types of marshes, with the flakes forming on what is known as salt tables.
But King has no illusions about the challenges facing Mobile Bay. Today, he says, when you see someone swimming near Fairhope Pier, it’s usually a tell-tale sign that they’re not local — a fact he finds heartbreaking.
“But yeah, I really hope that at some point, Fairhope Salt Company can get water from Fairhope,” he says.
Until then, we’ll just savor the taste of the Gulf.
To order salt, go to fairhopesaltcompany.com.
