The Whitstable Oyster Company can trace its origins back to the 1400s; indeed, it is one of the oldest companies in Europe and has a long, rich history of farming the famous Royal Whitstable Native Oyster. But Whitstable oysters go even further back, almost two thousand years, to when the Romans discovered them and, regarding them as a delicacy, shipped them back live to Rome. More recently, and at the company’s peak in the 1850s, it was sending as many as 80 million oysters a year to Billingsgate fish market. By then the plentiful oyster had become the food of the poor.