Golden Gulf Coast Packing Company in Biloxi, Mississippi is a longstanding seafood business built upon a multi-generational cornerstone of strength and heritage. Richard Gollott, vice president of the company, followed the footsteps of his grandfather, Armond George Gollott, and father, Edgar Madison Gollott, who both made a living from an industry that relied on seasonal harvests pulled from Gulf waters.

Although generations of Gollott men worked the varying seafood seasons, the roots of Golden Gulf stem primarily from the oyster business. When Richard was still in school, he started working for his dad’s oyster company, and although it kept him busy and provided decent wages, at times the labor was more than strenuous. But Richard didn’t mind because he was raised from a young age that this type of industry demands a tireless commitment.

“When I was younger, we did a little bit of everything to try and make it. We were in the oyster business in the wintertime and were in the crab business in the summertime, and the shrimp business, too. We had trucks going all throughout north Mississippi selling to restaurants and grocery stores.”

“Everything was done by hand back then and I’ll never forget one Christmas, we had a load of oysters come in from Texas, and these sacks weighed about 130 pounds each and I had 400 sacks on this truck,” he says. “So, I got a couple of guys to come help me and after about thirty minutes, they looked at me and said, ‘We don’t have to work like this,’ and left. I had to unload the whole truck by myself on Christmas Eve, but that’s just part of the business. We grew up working, and yeah, it was hard work, but we didn’t mind hard work. You had to be dedicated because that’s how we made a living. That was everything.”

In 1969, he took his experience and knowledge and started Cap’n Gollott Seafood on Biloxi’s Back Bay, which at one time became the largest oyster dealer in the northern Gulf of Mexico, and he’s only gone up from there with Golden Gulf Coast Packing Company.

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