Seaweed goes mainstream

Speaking at the inaugural conference of the Scottish Seaweed Industry Association (SSIA), which took place in Oban on 16-11, the CEO of Mara Seaweed, Fiona Houston, revealed her excitement, about the listing with the UK chain Morrisons. It was clear her excitement was tinged with relief.

“It’s taken six years, 20 processes, and 9 audits to get here,” she reflected. “It’s one of the problems of starting from scratch, but now many of you will be able to buy our products off the supermarket shelf, so we finally feel like we’re getting there.”

After six years of hard work, things finally look to be taking off, however, and not just due to the listing of the company’s three dried seaweeds – dulse, kombu and shony.

“Our production has trebled this year and we aim to do the same next year,” she revealed.

And the dried seaweeds are by no means limited to the UK market. “70% of our sales this year have been to the US,” she explains.

However, as she points out, there is a limit to how much they can grow. “We currently wild harvest seasonal seaweeds,” she reflects, “but our Holy Grail would be an enormous commercially produced, reliable supply of dulse.”

As a result, she would be keen to see a thriving seaweed cultivation industry, but – following a dulse cultivation project the company took part in with Otter Ferry Seafish – she feels that considerably more research needs to be done. “Our project worked [and showed that dulse could be cultured in Scotland] but it’s still cheaper to harvest from the wild,” she observed.

Looking ahead, she is clearly hoping that the Scottish industry will succeed in culturing a number of species of seaweeds in the long run. “Our aim is to make the company and the seaweed industry sustainable and profitable,” she concluded.