A: [0:00] Although I guess how do you like to introduce yourself is a very vague way of –

 

Q: [0:07] Well, there’s an easier warmup question.

 

A: [0:10] I actually read that and I was like, what are they trying to get at that I’m missing?

 

Q: [0:13] If you could do how do you like to spell your name, and then we can –

 

A: [0:23] OK.  I can spell my name, because it always gets spelled incorrectly.  So Seraphina, which is S-E-R-A-P-H-I-N-A.  Last name Erhart, E-R-H-A-R-T.

 

Q: [0:38] Great.  So how do you like to introduce yourself is just sort of like how would you describe what you do?

 

A: [0:46] (laughter) Like nothing else.  When I’m feeling funny, I will call myself the Seaweed Princess.  Generally, I use the title general manager, but what I do is so variable on the day, the time of year, who I’m interacting with.  If you’re talking to students, it’s going to be a different story than if you’re talking to other businesspeople who know the industry and what you’re interested in.  I’m a desk jockey.  I don’t get to go out onto the water.  But I basically take dried seaweed and figure out how to get it out into the world so that people eat it and get to appreciate it and be nourished by it, whether that’s in their body or in their garden or feeding their pets or whatever version that looks like for them.  And all the things in between that involve supporting the harvesters that bring the product to us that we get to resell, supporting the environment that they make their living off of, that I make my living off of, supporting our employees, because I can’t sell it and get it out the door if I don’t have them involved.  So I also do a lot of things that are not about running this business, but are about being in the industry, from being an advisory member for the Maine Sea Grant Committee to being an active member of the Maine Seaweed Council in my own community.  I also decided to start a whole entire other business that has nothing to do with seaweed. (laughter) So that’s a long answer.  But it’s a lot of things.

 

Q: [2:30] Could you tell me a little bit about where we are right now?

 

A: [2:35] Sure.  We are in Hancock, Maine, about 17 miles from where we were founded in my parents’ kitchen in 1971.  They moved from the kitchen after the wallpaper peeled off, because at that point, they were harvesting themselves, and the drying of the seaweed made all the old wallpaper peel off the house. (laughter) Then they moved into the barn, and then they moved about four miles away to a second building in 1993.  And then we built this building in the winter of 2014 into ’15 and that July moved in here.  So we’re in 18,000 square feet of custom for us building, and just this year we ripped out our first wall to put in a new piece of equipment.  We hoped we might make it to 10 years.  We didn’t quite make it that far, but pretty darn close.  We’re also, what, two-thirds of the way up the Maine coast depending on where you are and how you know the state of Maine – not far from Acadia National Park.  I get to see Cadillac Mountain on my drive to work every morning.

 

Q: [3:47] And can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up?

 

A: [3:50] Right here. (laughter) I have left and come back willingly.  I was born in Blue Hill, which is about 20 miles in the other direction from here.  I grew up in Franklin.  I went to middle and high school in Mount Desert Island, and then I left.  I went to college in Massachusetts.  I lived in southern Maine for a couple decades.  And then my dad started talking about retiring, and I came back.  I also had the privilege of growing up in the tide pools, which I didn’t recognize for a really long time was a really special experience.  But now, I think it’s – that part of being brought up in this business got into my nervous system, I think, in ways that I didn’t even recognize until much later in life.  And walking in this building and smelling seaweed every day kind of calms me down and feels really good.  If I’m too far away from the ocean, I’m not a very nice person.  I definitely need to be close to the ocean.  Is that good?

 

Q: [5:00] Yeah, absolutely.  Can you tell me a little bit about where your parents are from and what they did?

 

A: [5:06] Yeah, I’m really lucky they’re still both very much alive and kicking at 80 and 82.  Let’s see.  My dad is from Cornwall, Connecticut.  My mother is from somewhere really near White River Junction, Vermont.  I’m not actually going to come up with the small town at the moment.  Most of my life – they started this business together, but my mother got out pretty early and realized that she couldn’t be married and do the business at the same time.  She is an incredible organic gardener and spends most of her time somehow connected to the land, despite the fact that, of course, here in rural Maine in the winter, you can’t always access the land.  And my father is still involved in the seaweed industry in a much more removed consulting basis through the Maine Seaweed Council, mostly, and with the state working on best practices with the DMR and hoping that we can get some regulatory stuff in place.  Yeah, they didn’t have a lot to do with the fisheries.  They met in grad school and dropped out together and traveled cross-country and tried to figure out where they wanted to settle and came here as part of the Back to the Lander movement.  And their interest in foraging and understanding food of where they lived is really a big part of how Maine Coast Sea Vegetables came to be.

 

Q: [6:44] Do you have any siblings?

 

A: [6:46] I do not – only child.

 

Q: [6:48] And what year were you born?

 

A: [6:49] 1974.

 

Q: [6:51] And you have talked about this a lot already, but is there anything you want to add about the history of fishing in your family?

 

A: [6:58] My grandparents met fly-fishing, which has always struck me as really interesting. (laughter) I was raised as a vegetarian, and I’ve often thought because of my love of the water and the very meditative practice that fly-fishing has always struck me as, that if I had not been raised as a vegetarian, I’m pretty sure I would have followed suit.  But yeah, I don’t come from many generations of fishing in this family, and also being a woman and not having that history when I came back here to work for this business – that was one of my father’s concerns was how that was going to go down with the suppliers who are all very much multigenerational fishing families.  Turns out family trumps everything for them pretty much.  Like I have not had that experience, which I’m eternally grateful for.

 

Q: [8:04] Sure.  And again, in this context, it’s kind of an interesting question, but do you have any history of family working in other roles in the fishing industry, such as bookkeeping, processing, marketing?

 

A: [8:17] Yeah, other than my parents being like the early harvesters and the early marketers and all the beginning phases of getting this business off the ground, no.

 

Q: [8:28] Are you married?

 

A: [8:29] No.

 

Q: [8:30] Do you have any children?

 

A: [8:31] No.  Or I have 24 employees. (laughter)

 

Q: [8:40] How would you describe your role in fishing and the aquaculture industry in Maine?

 

A: [8:46] I don’t consider myself part of aquaculture.  However, I value what aquaculture is bringing to our state, and I know that aquaculture needs to be a part of this business’s reality in order to be able to expand beyond the wild harvesting that we’ve been doing.  Seaweed, in my opinion, has a unique story amongst the fisheries in Maine, in that we’ve managed to stay on the side of taking care of the environment in which it exists.  I don’t believe that there’s over-harvesting happening, in part because there are a handful of businesses who have been around almost as long as we have – 50-plus years of doing it in the same areas in a respectful way that seems to be responsible resource management, even though we have no legal requirements.  We have to buy a license from the state, that’s it.  So there’s a lot of reasons to be cautious going forward, especially as seaweed becomes a bigger interest in the state, in the fishing world, in our food system.  And I think if we’re not careful, we’re going to tip that scale pretty quickly.  So it’s part of why we’re pushing really hard to work with the DMR to create our own – how should I phrase this?  We want regulation, but we want regulation in consultation.  We don’t want to be part of the we were regulated because we frigged it up.  So the question was how do I see myself in the seaweed and aquaculture or the fisheries and aquaculture world?  I see myself as part of the solution, I hope – that Maine Coast Sea Vegetables and its history can use that history to help tell a good story and keep seaweed in a positive light and also hopefully be cautious.  We’re a model of slow growth.  And I think that if you can stay in that and out of a lot of more traditional, commercial-scale – well, it’s not – commercial-scale is not right, because we’re commercial-scale.  But there’s a way in which it can grow to the point where you’re not looking at the resource anymore.  You’re only looking at the value of what you’re taking and how that is going to feed your family, not all the steps in between.  So I don’t know how successful we’ll be, but if we’re not in the middle and we’re not part of the conversation, then I’m sure it’s not going to go well.  We’ll see if we can have any positive influence.

 

Q: [11:48] Great.  I’m going to come back to that, but just briefly – and again, these questions are funny.  We’ve talked about it a little already.  But I would love if you could just describe how you came into this work.

 

A: [11:57] In utero.  It’s in my blood.  Sometimes when we start Seaweed Council meetings, someone will ask a prepper question as we go around and introduce ourselves and ask like what brought you here or why is this important to you, and I usually say because it’s literally in my blood.  As an American without Asian genetics, I am probably one of the few who was born and raised and has the digestive enzymes to eat seaweed in the volume that I do.  I lost the question.  You’re going to have to try that again. (laughter)

 

Q: [12:36] Absolutely.  If you could just describe how you got into this work.

 

A: [12:39] OK.  So I got into this work by having the family connection, but in actuality, I chose to come back and invest in being here, because I’d had my own experience in the entrepreneurial world that did not go so well, mixed with my father talking about selling the business or moving on.  And as we’ve discussed, I don’t have siblings, so it was me or nothing. I came back thinking that I was going to be the outside sales rep for the company and travel New England and get to talk about – so I’ve always loved seaweed.  That wasn’t ever the question.  I got here and realized that was not what this company needed – that there was a whole bunch of long-term, dedicated employees who were terrified, because my father kept saying he was going to retire, but there was no plan.  And I think they all literally thought one day he was going to walk in and be like, OK, I’m out.  Good luck.  And we were growing at a rate at that point where a lot of the infrastructure that we had wasn’t keeping up with the needs of the company.  So I often – this building is a good example, but there’s been a lot of less visible ways in which we’ve been shoring up the infrastructure.  When you’ve got a business that’s been around this long, that’s as grassroots as we are, I’m often talking about how I feel like I’m shoving the foundation back under the existing business – you know, that model of you’re building a plane and flying a plane at the same time.  We are actively doing that on a daily basis here. (laughter) Not entirely sure I’m answering your question the way you want, but here we go.

 

Q: [14:25] No, it’s great.  Can you talk a little bit more about your experience, and your experience inherently is beyond fishing and harvesting.  I have a few ways that question is broken up, so maybe those are good access points.  Sort of experience with bookkeeping or gear preparation – if you have any of that – experience in post-harvest processing, which you have tons of experience in, or experience in advocacy.  You’ve talked a little bit about that.  But if you could break all of those things down – and I’m happy to ask this question (multiple conversations; inaudible).

 

A: [14:57] Yeah, you’re going to probably have to break that up for me.  So not so much in the bookkeeping, although I do all of our organic record-keeping for both this company and for four of our main suppliers.  That’s not numbers, but it’s a whole lot of documentation.  And I have a heavy hand in all of our FDA food safety regulatory requirements as well.  Post-harvest processing – yeah, once it’s dry, I’ve done a lot of things with it. (laughter) I have spent some time out on the water.  I have had my own harvesting license at times just so that we can go out and do training and experimental stuff with employees, or for other reasons at different times it’s made sense. I get to go out for the harvest inspections every year.  That’s usually my one foray out there.  But it also helps that we have a regular connection.  Even though those harvesters are not our employees, we talk about them, many of them, as though they are part of our operation, because we work so closely with them.  And in about half the cases, we are their only seaweed buyer.  So it really is that close of a dependency.  They bring us dry stuff.  We do all kinds of things.  We mill it, we mix it.  We do a lot of quality control.  That’s probably primarily what we do.  We market it, we put it in pretty packages or less-pretty packages and ship it back out the door to whoever wants it.  And they do make fancy pet foods with it or put it in their bath or eat it or probably all kinds of things I don’t even know about.  And then there was a third part of that.

 

Q: [16:54] Yeah, experience in advocacy or community-based conversation.

 

A: [16:57] That’s probably the newer aspect.  Turns out when you run a company that’s been around for a long time in an industry that’s growing rapidly, you get asked to join a lot of things.  And I have days where I wish I had more time for that.  Mostly it’s through, as I mentioned before, the Maine Seaweed Council, being a program advisory member for the Maine Sea Grant and representing the seaweed industry in that world.  And then sometimes in unique environments, people will invite me or someone here to come speak or participate.  But those are the regular ones.

 

Q: [17:42] Can you talk a little bit more about what that involvement looks like?

 

A: [17:45] Yeah.  With Sea Grant, it’s interesting, because I feel like it’s just as – I get just as much from it as I feel like I give, if not more, because I so enjoy being in a room with so many other – both industry, but definitely ocean-based thinking people in all the ways in which that can be.  And you get to see the interconnectedness of all those pieces and how it impacts the state of Maine through that filter of all of us being in a room with maybe a particular topic.  I mean, it changes all the time.  So yes, I’m there with like thinking about how the seaweed part of that and our fishery is part of the whole state, but I appreciate also being reminded that we’re just one of many pieces.  So it’s more of that larger ecosystem thinking in an entirely different realm.  And we sometimes get to go to really cool places, which never breaks my heart, right? (laughter) Experience helps it all.  With the Seaweed Council, that’s evolving a lot – the industry growth.  So they celebrated 30 years in existence this past June.  And I’m actually actively engaging with at least a portion of that membership to do a strategic plan, because I think the industry growth is happening much faster than the small volunteer organization can manage.  Talk about advocacy – we’re getting asked to participate in and educate in all sorts of ways.  And we want that.  We want seaweed to be a good news story.  There are plenty of people out there trying to badmouth the industry as fast as we’re trying to not or educate and put regulations that protect us all in place.  So we’re discussing like how does the growth of the Seaweed Council meet the needs of the growing industry in order to be supportive of the state and of people who want to enter the fishery, and also not accidentally look like what we’re actually doing is supporting so much unsustainable growth?  Because I think there are a lot of people who are questioning that right now on the aquaculture or the wild harvest side, both.  I don’t know that our state is the right environment for the scale at which people are talking about some forms of aquaculture here.  And when people reach out and tell me, for example, that they want to know how many metric tons do we think we could reasonably harvest, because they want to turn seaweed into a plastic alternative – I’m all for plastic alternative.  I’m not all for decimating what exists before we even understand the consequences or the possibilities.  So yeah, I’m a little afraid of the chicken and the egg or the cart and the horse, whatever that is. (laughter) I think everybody’s really excited about the possibility.  I’m not so sure that there’s enough attention being paid to what’s actually happening in the industry and its ability to keep up with all the potential.

 

Q: [21:32] Could you describe what an average day of work looks like for you?

 

A: [21:36] There’s no such thing running a small business.  It’s not a thing.  Variety.  Yeah, rolling with whatever comes. Lately – well, lately – the last four years, it’s been kind of a game of who shows up and what can we get done.  It’s a triage of none of us exist if the product doesn’t go out the door, so that’s always top priority.  So most of the time, I’m answering emails and dealing with the management of a business, but some days that is not the top priority, and I’m out there processing product with whoever happens to be around, which I actually kind of enjoy sometimes.  And other days, you’ve got a deadline and you’ve got people coming to visit, and you waltz in and there’s a whole bunch of unexpected things, and it can be a little stressful, too.  An average day – it seems like such a simple question.  I don’t have that kind of routine where – I know running a boat – a lobster boat, for example, will come with variety, too, because your engine might go down or any number of other things.  So there’s a level at which that applies, I think, always, where problem-solving is 100% a big part of the day job.  It’s just am I problem-solving on a screen?  Am I problem-solving because a piece of equipment’s gone down?  Am I problem-solving because I’ve got employees not talking to each other?  I don’t know.  Yeah, I don’t know that I can do better than that for an answer.

 

Q: [23:29] What are some responsibilities you have to fill pretty routinely?  Maybe that’s a different way of thinking about it.

 

A: [23:37] Yeah, there’s sort of like the categories of things that I – so we have, I think, 13 suppliers of seaweed raw material specifically, but six of them are like family-scale operations, and I have a lot of regular contact with them.  So that’s a sort of sizable, regular part of my life.  But it has a bit of a rhythm to it, because of course the seaweed is only actually harvested – depending on the species, you know, March to July/August or maybe June to September/October.  So that will ramp up throughout the summer.  Right now, all of the organic documentation for all the operations is in process, and between now and May, that’ll all get completed.  So that’s like five mini-research projects that are happening in the background.  Then there’s all that extra stuff we’re talking about.  Like today was a bunch of emails back and forth getting ready for a Seaweed Council meeting, and that’s pretty normal.  Or making plans because of lovely humans like you who want to come and talk to us, or I had another PhD student on the West Coast who wants to interview us for a different purpose.  I would say twice a month there’s something like that that’s coming across our desk in some fashion.  Backing up the customer service team with the really weird, gnarly, unusual things, because we have a joke here that we’re 1-800-SEAWEED. (laughter) I think we’re one of the more visible for human consumption US-based seaweed companies.  So when people are confused or looking for answers, we get a lot of really interesting things coming across our desk.  Working with our science advisor on whatever.  You know, he’s always sort of helping us improve many different types of systems.  Right now, we’re gathering samples for all of our annual testing that we do once a year.  Working with the sales team on whatever weirdnesses they’ve got.  Triage of all the different departments I think is part of how that general manager hat works, right?  The production manager and I pretty much spend a chunk of time every day.  The accounts department, same deal.  There’s always some level of HR going on behind the scenes of all of it.  Yeah, I think the better question might be what isn’t in my purview. (laughter) Yeah, too much.  It’s not the same every day, but there’s rhythms and pieces that are sort of ongoing all the time.

 

Q: [26:33] Great.  And you touched on this a little already, but do you hold any commercial licenses?

 

A: [26:36] I do not personally.  The business has its food facility license.  And I have had a harvesting license, but I do not at the moment – yeah, both for the Maine Department of Ag and then for the federal FDA.  And then our organics isn’t a license, but it is an annual inspection.

 

Q: [27:05] And how do you feel that your background or identity shapes your work, including how others perceive or treat you?

 

A: [27:15] Oh, interesting.  So off the recording, we talked about my background in art, and I think that one of the things I’ve sort of been taking in more and more is the fact that I approach just about everything from a creative problem-solving, which can be really helpful and sometimes makes it really hard to work with the spreadsheet, money, everything is linear and fits in a box.  I do not exist in that universe.  But we need each other, right?  I have to remind them that everything that they see on a screen is not all that there is, and I need to be reminded that that is also a practical part of running a business.  You have to always know what all the buckets have in them, whether we’re talking about inventory or cash or whatever it is.  There are times when I think it’s really helpful that that creative background allows me to move in and out of all these things, but I also get overwhelmed by it, because I have too many things that I’m trying to hold and keep and problem-solve all at the same time.  So it’s a blessing and a curse.  I’m not sure I answered your question accurately, though.

 

Q: [28:40] Well, I’m curious.  You had mentioned earlier when you were talking about coming back to this business, sort of your positionality among these harvesters who have this family history and your position as a woman entering this industry.  Can you talk a little bit more about that?

 

A: [28:55] Yeah, I know it’s a thing.  I’m not sure if I don’t allow it to be a thing or if they don’t see it as a thing, honestly.  I mean, it’s not that I’ve never experienced being treated as less than because I’m a woman, but I have not experienced that within the fisheries side of this.  I’ve experienced it with technicians who come to fix a piece of equipment and treating me like I couldn’t possibly know what I’m talking about.  I experienced it a little bit in working with the bazillion contractors in building this facility.  I helped design the facility.  I knew what the plan was.  I understood what the workflow needed to be.  I knew what the priorities were.  But I didn’t always get that level of respect in that environment.   But when I’m dealing with the harvesters and out on the water, I don’t have that, thankfully.  I get partly maybe because they’ve all worked with my dad, and they learned from him and they understood that this company in their land of seaweed being one of the few fisheries and being way ahead of it – being one of the few fisheries that they got to participate in yearly, that it was a meaningful part of their annual income.  So I think that in and of itself just sort of gave us, and therefore me, some ground to stand on without having to prove myself all the time.  More recently, as the seaweed industry in Maine is growing and as aquaculture is having such a light shed on it at the international level, what I keep hearing is how many intense and powerful women are involved in the seaweed industry. (laughter) I’m not dumb.  I’m pretty sure I’m one of those.  I’m definitely not a quiet person.  My version might look differently.  I’m not a public speaker.  I’m not like a seaweed’s going to save the world kind of person.  I’m more of a like, we’re here, and we’re here to stay.  I think this is meaningful.  And I think we have something really important to contribute to our food systems and to our ability to grow the population and still feed each other nutritious food and not completely devastate the soil.  Not sure if that is answering your question either.

 

Q: [31:31] Yeah, absolutely.  And I’d love to hear – do you think there are a lot of strong, powerful women in seaweed?

 

A: [31:37] There are definitely a few in this state. (laughter) Yeah, I’ve met quite a few, and I think there’s probably more that I don’t know.  It’s certainly not the only people, but I would say a lot of the newer generation of industry businesspeople are – seemingly a lot of women out there.  When other people have asked me variations on that question, one of the things that comes up for me is I think we’re generally more willing to collaborate.  And in an industry that’s new and growing and you can’t pick something off the shelf and apply it, you kind of have to figure it out, I suspect that there’s a reason that we’re being successful, because we’re more willing to communicate with each other and work with each other and learn and share and not like – yes, there may be my competition at some level on paper, but there’s a lot of room in this sector still, and I think that we’re better together.  And if we are all on some similar page in terms of the type of story we want to tell about the industry, then this is more of the tide rises all boats situation than pointing fingers and trying to keep it for ourselves.  I have no idea how accurate that is, but it’s the sense of who I get to work with on a regular basis.

 

Q: [33:07] Do you think there’s something specific to seaweed that sort of draws women to it?

 

A: [33:12] Oh, that’s a really interesting question.  Maybe.  But then again, my first instinct is, well, we’re driven by the moon, right?  You can only harvest wild seaweeds at the biggest new moon and full moon tides.  As humans, our blood is very similar to all the micronutrients that are in the seaweeds.  So I’ve always felt like there’s a similarity and attraction there for people who are interested in channeling that or paying attention to it.  Maybe in that sort of general way that – not everybody, but I find more women willing to slow down enough to pay attention to more of that level of nuance and maybe be willing to accept they don’t know everything, that there is stuff to learn from the environment around them.  In a very reverse sexism-type statement, I don’t find too many men able to do that.  Their nervous system and the way they’ve been raised in this culture primarily feeds this dialogue that they are meant to dominate everything, which tends to also, in my experience, not allow them to just be present, to just listen, to pay attention to the more subtle aspects.  So maybe.

 

Q: [35:03] Yeah, absolutely.  Thank you.  Can you describe any changes in the marine environment, maybe in product or any other way that you’ve noticed?

 

A: [35:12] Yeah, it’s subtle, and what I would say is it’s not like a linear experience.  So for example, a couple of our species, when I look back at our decades of buying history, I can see that like every three to five years, they’ll have a falloff and then they’ll have a really big boom, and that has stayed to be the case.  But what I’m seeing in the last decade is it seems like all of the species are having more of a variety in that way.  You know, there’s some theories about different – like last year, for example, it rained all through May and June.  And that meant we didn’t have as much sunlight.  It was really slow growth.  The water got warmer faster.  The salinity was way down.  It increased biofouling.  And we didn’t get as much what we would consider first-quality food-grade product at the time of year that we would have expected.  Each species has its own growing cycle and its own way of being.  The sugar kelp that meant they didn’t get very much harvest, because once it gets to the point where it’s sporing and looks ratty and horrible – sometime in late June to mid-July depending on how it goes – they’re done for the season, and then we’re just working with what we have.  Whereas with the dulse, all the hundreds of females that become a full frond every on average two-week cycle, it looks like junk through July because of all that fresh water.  It was creating all this microalgae on the surface that we call gray leaf, and it just looks like the dulse has molded.  It’s fine if we mill it and we’re turning it into a powder, and it can still be used, but we can’t pay top dollar for it.  There’s a whole bunch more labor that goes into it.  So it’s discouraging for the harvesters.  It’s discouraging for us.  It changes what we can sell or how we can sell it.  But then September rolled around, and we had all this late fall, gorgeous, perfect dulse, but the season’s really short at that point.  So yeah, it’s changing, but it’s not like every year I’m seeing the same type of pattern.  What I can say is every year the pattern is really drastically different.  And sometimes, it’s pretty explainable and it’s a pattern we’ve seen a decade before, and it’s just that’s how it’s going.  Some things, it seems like the season’s extending.  Other things, it seems like the season’s shortening.  I think the most consistent part is that it is inconsistent. (laughter) You know, I was today on the phone with two different harvesters, and they’re both – I hope they’re only looking at it from what they didn’t make in income, which is completely understandable.  But they’ve also been working with us now for so many decades that they really see that impact when it happens multiple years in a row for various reasons.  A couple years ago, the kelp in particular – we’re pretty sure that we had a lot of ice that winter and it was warm later, so the spores settled much later.  And we’re – one, a couple of people are theorizing that that particular winter, all the spores were so microscopic, they got scraped off by the ice, whereas if they’d gotten bigger because they’d settled sooner, they might have survived more of that experience.  Because it just wasn’t there that spring, which is very, very unusual.  So yes, change.  What the change is?  Got nothing. (laughter)

 

Q: [39:02] How are you seeing the impact of those changes?

 

A: [39:07] Well, this is where what I do in the middle is probably the hardest to manage right now.  I’ve been thinking a lot about the realities of, for example, things like Whole Foods, which as it evolved into what it is now for years and years and years was a huge part of our industry model.  We are a food that appeals to the type of person who at least 10 years ago I would have said primarily would go shopping at a place like Whole Foods.  I don’t think that applies anymore.  When Amazon bought it out, Maine Coast Sea Vegetables vanished from Whole Foods in a lot of parts of the country, which was a huge blow for us and for our customer base.  And the primary reason is because we exist in more of a CSA-type model, where my sales are not because there’s demand.  My sales are because that’s what got harvested and that’s what’s out there in our warehouse to be sold.  Obviously, we do our best to keep stuff year-round.  We change our sales rhythm – not has nothing to do with the harvest rhythm, but we we try to let the harvest happen and then make our plan for the sale so that we’re always sort of able to adapt.  But we’re working in an environment which beyond us, everybody wants consistency.  They want to fill that shelf, and it’s about turnover rate, and it’s about you can always provide them what they want, and they don’t understand or frankly care what happened out on the bay, what happened for the harvesters, what Mother Nature did that year.  Just provide it.  That’s kind of it.  I don’t know.  I mean, I think the aquaculture or seaweed industry is working to try to change that story, which may be good.  Maybe we’ll have a handful of species that we can consistently provide all the time in the volume that those types of larger-scale stores and environments need.  And then I can imagine a version in which Maine Coast Sea Vegetables – it really is more of a CSA.  If you’re from Maine and you know what fiddleheads are, it’s a seasonal thing, and some things we’ll only get in small batches and it’ll be available until it’s gone, and then we’ll have this other line that supports us year-round.  Right now, I’m trying to support 20-plus internal year-round employees with whatever happens.  So I can’t have it just sell out all the time and then have nothing to do for a couple of months.  We had one spring like that by accident.  It is unpleasant on so many levels.  Your question was about what’s changing, right?

 

Q: [42:03] And how those different environmental changes have impacted your work.

 

A: [42:07] Right.  So it’s impacting our work, because we’re really having to change how we think about sales here.  We can’t play the game that those big chain stores want us to play, or participate in all the incredible – you know, discount, free giveaway, all that stuff.  We don’t sell widgets.  We don’t sell highly processed food.  We sell something that is wild and natural and unique and different all the time, and different in its volume all the time as well.  So I think it’s possible, but talk about taking creativity.  You can’t just apply – you know, I’ve got two people who are always like, I just want an answer, and it applies to all the things.  I’m like, you do not work for that company.  I’m so sorry. (laughter) It’s not going to happen.  Whether we’re talking about the suppliers – they’ve all got slightly different variations on themes – or how we sell each species or – yeah.

 

Q: [43:04] And is there anything that you’ve tried to sort of respond to the changes that you’re seeing with all of this?

 

A: [43:10] Yeah, shifting to more direct to the consumer sale than we used to do.  Thinking about more connection to other types of seasonal businesses – for example, like a area restaurant or a summer camp or something that’s going to handle that more farm-to-table thinking.  Creating products that we can supply in volume year-round that are somewhat seaweed-based but not solely seaweed-based, so that we can also have some factor of that sort of consistent product that goes into a store but also income volume and workload volume here.  We have four customer groups.  It used to be that distribution, which is basically 10 retail items going out to stores, was 75% of our income.  That’s not the case anymore, and it’s unrealistic – and it’s probably healthier that it is not the case anymore.  But it takes a long time to adjust.  None of these things happen as quickly as the changes are happening.  So I can feel already that this year, sales cycles are different.  The harvesters are already starting to get itchy and looking for me to tell them what they want.  I haven’t even sold through most of 2023’s product yet.  So you can get kind of caught between both realities while you’re trying to change how you think about sales and what they want you to buy.  It’s a little bit of a shell game and risk. (laughter) But dried seaweed is beautiful like that.  It lasts a long time.

 

Q: [45:09] Yeah, and have you made, to that point, any changes in sort of how you’re processing the seaweed?

 

A: [45:13] Yeah.  Well, sadly, two years in, it isn’t actually fully functional yet.  We got some DMR grant funding to automate one of our product lines to help.  At the time, largely we were having employee turnover like never before and higher volume of sales of that particular line.  And it was one of the few things that we could automate here, with the goal that it can produce more in the same week with the same number of people, but reduce the actual workload.  It’s pretty minor in the big picture of things, but it feels pretty monumental to us, because we’ve been very manual for a long time.  Seaweed destroys equipment.  It’s so salty.  So the only way I was going to invest in something like that was when somebody else paid for it, because it’s a very unproven process. (laughter) I would not be surprised if you called back in 10 years and I’m like, yeah – no, that’s rusted out.

 

Q: [46:17] Yeah, and these combinations of changing the way you sort of assess sales and also work with the processing – do you think that those have helped you be able to address these shifts in seaweed each year?

 

A: [46:27] Some of them, yeah.  Some of them is also just purely educating the customer and getting people to understand.  I’d say 30% to 50% of any given day of our customer service team work can be along the lines of it’s a wild product.  I know it doesn’t look or taste or feel or whatever exactly the same as the last bag you bought from us.  That’s an unrealistic expectation.  This is not greenhouse-grown, uniform tomatoes or any other things.  The other part is we get scrutinized more like we’re a supplement company, in that that’s how people look at seaweeds in a lot of cases.  So that’s a different side of the challenge, in that I’m realizing – I’m not realizing.  We’ve known this for a long time.  But it seems to be expanding.  People ask questions as though we’re closer to a healthcare practitioner than somebody who might stock the shelves in the grocery department.  You’re not going to ask them the same level of scrutinized questions about the sweet potato you’re buying and expect them to know that, but they expect us to know that.  So it’s challenging to figure out how to meet all those different dynamics, right?  You’ve got all these people who want all the testing information, nutritional information.  They want to know what the right amount is or the best tasting or all these other aspects.  And I think that boils down to it’s new.  It’s definitely on the higher end of cost.  And maybe they understand that it’s healthy for them, but they don’t know what to do with it.  Somehow if they can scrutinize us and get to know us at that level, maybe it’ll create trust.  I don’t really know.  I mean, certainly the model we take is we’re going to give you as much information as we can so you can make your own good decisions and try to be transparent.  To your question of like has it helped us change?  I think we are changing, in that we are realizing that that’s just the nature of who our customer base is always going to be.  So we’re actually in the process of looking at rebranding – refreshing our brand after all these decades.  A lot of these discussions are around like we’re grounded in the health food – seaweed for your health world.  That’s how my parents started this company.  Maybe we want to reframe how we talk about it so that we’re acknowledging that, but we’re not necessarily promoting it as much so that we can pack a little bit away from being so close to the medical industry. (laughter) FDA also doesn’t love that.

 

Q: [49:27] Sure.  And I’m curious – you mentioned the grant that you were able to automate.  Is there anything else that’s been really useful in sort of helping you adapt to these really dramatic swings in product, like what you have access to year by year and are working with?

 

A: [49:42] Yeah, in 2020 – we never got the training, because it was the pandemic, but we moved ourselves into an automated sales and inventory system.  It took almost three years to really trust it.  But our sales impact our inventory, so we can sort of always look at how that’s going in a way that makes us able to answer questions quicker and understand, yes, we can fulfill that.  That’s unrealistic.  That’s really changed the sales volume.  When you’re only doing quarterly or bi-yearly large-scale inventories, it’s harder to be as responsive when new customer inquiries come in.  So to feel like we have a handle on that at any given point in any given day is really helpful.

 

Q: [50:35] Do you feel like you’ve been able to adapt in the ways that you want?

 

A: [50:40] (laughter) Some.  You can only realistically run a company and change so many things and be efficient and keep your employees engaged/not angry about it at any given time.  Every decision has a ripple effect and creates change all up and down the whole process.  So someone will come who works in a different part of the company and have what to them is a really good idea, because they’re looking at this one aspect of it, and that’s fine.  But it gets challenging, because usually – occasionally you luck out and it’s like, yeah, of course.  Go forth!  But a lot of times you have to pause and go, OK, that’s a great idea, but let’s look at how that choice will impact all these other things.  That takes time, and it can be frustrating, because if you’re not holding the whole picture – you’re only doing this one particular job – it just feels like I’m always the bearer of bogged-down, slow responsiveness.  So I think we’ve done a pretty good job.  I also am aware that if I took that same question around the building, I probably would get a very different set of answers, which says we’re doing some of it.

 

Q: [52:09] I’m just thinking – one thing we haven’t said, but I know at least, is that you’re an employee-owned enterprise here, right?

 

A: [52:16] Yeah.

 

Q: [52:17] So I was just thinking – how does that factor into making changes to a company, when it’s not a sole proprietary kind of ownership model?

 

A: [52:26] Yeah, thank you for bringing that up.  In 2017, my father sold this company to the employees, and we became 100% employee-owned.  The way we structured it is myself and one other primary manager have 51% of that so that the employees can’t earn enough shares and sell it out from under us, because apparently that’s happened.  But also because I am the second generation, I still feel pretty regularly like the expectation is everybody sees me as running the company, which I find interesting, because I feel like all I do is work to make sure that that’s not the perception.  Yeah, somebody has to have their Social Security number on everything and their neck stuck out a little farther than everybody else to take responsibility to have a business and have the loan to finance this building and all the other things that come with it.  But we also are a consensus management group, so the hope is that that will level out.  However, I’m learning in hindsight that not everybody is good at collaboration.  (laughter) We’ve had change in that management group, and it’s fine.  It’s a good learning experience.  But it’s also been really eye-opening at how much that change has created change in our daily sort of way we’re working through.  But I will say that the upside is that it does create an environment in which the employees I think for the most part feel like they’re welcome and wanted to have an opinion, which is why I think I also have such a hard time not just being able to do all the things that come.  I wish that I didn’t have all these other things on my desk a lot of days so that I could focus on creating the changes that they want, because a lot of them are super-valid or at least getting to a point where they really understand why we’re not doing it that way, so that they’re bought into the process that is in existence, because there is usually a reason.  But it’s kind of really impossible to do both well.  You’re either kind of managing the daily or the rest of the company.  And we’re at that scale where we’re doing both, and it’s mixed experiences.

 

Q: [54:58] So what is your biggest concern about the marine environment for the future for Maine’s fisheries and aquaculture industries?

 

A: [55:06] Oh, depends on the day.  If I’m talking to somebody who’s really worried about legislature or the lack thereof, it can be that right now, the only thing stopping someone coming from international waters and paying a $250 fee to buy a harvesting license, and all they have to do is report to the DMR – everything could be gone in the seaweed world.  I mean, everything is an over-exaggeration, because the way seaweed grows – it’s actually, I think, impossible.  It gets in all the crevices and all the places, you know?  If you’ve ever been to a rocky shoreline, you know that’s not actually possible.  It’s not trees.  You’re not clearcutting in that way.  But they could definitely do damage.  So that’s one version.  Our warming waters and all the very scary stories that – if you’re paying attention to anything scientific in this state, you’re aware that our waters are warming faster than the rest of the world, which is terrifying, and what that is going to do to the whole ecosystem – not just seaweed specifically, but the interconnectedness of it all.  I think seaweeds have the capacity to adapt, but they may be slower to adapt than the water warms.  I don’t know.  And maybe there are ways in which they are dependent on other parts of the ecosystem in which they live that will be more problematic than anybody recognizes right now.  I think we kind of joke on a regular basis that seaweed is sort of the bastard child of the fisheries, of the science and research money, of a lot of the things.  One of the assets to all the interest in aquacultured seaweed is that more money for research projects has come available in the last decade.  So we’ve moved the needle pretty significantly in a couple of important areas.  But yeah, it’s still a long ways off.  We don’t have the kind of information that a lot of the other fisheries have when it comes to food safety, when it comes to understanding its lifecycle and its interdependence on a lot of other things. Food safety is another one.  We don’t have a lot of information on that when it comes to seaweed, and a couple bad stories and it could be a really bad situation for all this new energy and turn a lot of people off.  And there’s a lot of good things happening, but there’s a lot of lack of awareness in that realm as well.  There’s probably more, but that’s enough worst-case scenarios.  I don’t like to live in worst-case scenarios.  It’s not my comfort zone.

 

Q: [58:08] Have you personally noticed any change from the warming water?

 

A: [58:13] I don’t know if this is factual or not.  What I have noticed is more customer complaints about things like our Alaria not having as much of the outer soft frond and being more midrib than it is actual leaf.  I’m unconvinced if that’s accurate, but it is interesting that like for the last three years or so, that seems to have been a pattern I hear more that I don’t ever remember.  And these are people who – you know, I can prove they’ve been buying from us since the ’80s.  So they’re on to something.  Is it that they got later in the year product before?  Is that a different harvester?  There’s a lot of variables there.  I don’t think I could definitively say, yeah, this, this, and this are really different.  Periwinkles seem to be more.  Bryophytes seem to be more.  The microalgae that creates the gray leaf that makes it so that we’re only able to use it as a milled product seems to be coming earlier.  And from year to year, even that will change.

 

Q: [59:33] Sure.  And if you could tell policymakers in Maine what the biggest priority should be to adapt to all these changes you’re seeing, what would you tell them?

 

A: [59:42] Oh, boy.  It’s probably something bigger than I think.  Like I was saying before about liking to be in that room with all the various minds that come together to act as the advisory panel for Sea Grant, I appreciate that because it gets me out of my own microcosm.  I’m also right now taking a leadership course through the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs in a similar vein of just wanting to connect with other industries and small businesses in the state, but in a lot of different sectors and not just in the fisheries sector.  Because we are experiencing different things, and maybe we have more things to learn from each other than anyone else could be aware of.  But because we all sort of live in our own lane, we’re not thinking that way.  So when it comes to the policymaking part of it, it’s probably like four stories up in a way that I’m not thinking that is a bigger umbrella of change that would impact us in the immediacy of it.  And here in this state – or even maybe it would be better at the federal level, although I have a lot of trepidation about that, because you cannot talk about seaweed as one item and do it justice.  Every single species has its own lifecycle, its own need for propagation, its own way of working when it comes to harvesting appropriately.  And if we just made a policy for seaweed, the way it often gets talked about, we’re going to do the industry and the future a humongous disservice.  And I have limited faith that at the federal level, that’s a thing that could happen well right now.  So I think for the moment at least, we’re better off at a state-by-state environment, because at least then we’re understanding what’s in our own backyard.  At that level, I think it would be to really understand here – pay for biomass assessments, understand where our starting point is, and actually know in real time what people are harvesting and where they are, so that they’re not overlapping each other.  And maybe we do need to have quotas or we need to create, you know, in a certain area, a certain amount.  I don’t know what the right answer is.  That’s way above my pay grade.  I do not have enough letters and acronyms after my name for that. (laughter) But there are a lot of people out there who do and are interested in it.  I think we’re capable.  There’s no money to do it.  There’s not enough interest.  We’re not the lobster industry.  So I don’t know how we get from here, while we’re still doing things pretty well, to the place where there’s enough money and interest and understanding of the need in order to make it happen.  I worry that there’s a disconnect there between those two realities that we have to be so far down the pike that we maybe will have already done too much damage in order to have enough awareness and enough funding and all the things that go with it.  So I don’t know.  Policymakers, get your head out of your ass and figure it out. (laughter)

 

Q: [1:03:03] Do you think there are resources that seaweed as an industry has that are useful in sort of helping towards those goals?

 

A: [1:03:12] Sure.  I mean, we do have – at the international level, there is definitely some level of knowledge and awareness that could be utilized.  However, at the international level, you also don’t have the level of scrutiny for food quality and some other things that we have intrinsically here in the US.  So a lot of people are like, oh, you can learn that from Korea.  Well, yeah, I can learn some things.  And then again, different species, different environment, different water, different shorelines, different ways in which all the fisheries interact with each other.  You put an aquaculture line out here in a lobster bay, and you’ve got a lot of people down at the pier who want to cut your lines and are basically saying you’re planting a garden where they want to lobster.  So I don’t know how we do better at working together.

 

Q: [1:04:11] And have you participated in any climate resilience or adaptation training or programs?

 

A: [1:04:16] I read a lot of things and I interact with a lot of people who do, but I am not actively doing it myself.

 

Q: [1:04:26] And what strategies do you think would be effective for building resilience against climate-related impacts for seaweed?

 

A: [1:04:33] Hmm.  This may not be relevant, but I keep going back to reevaluating our entire model of how we think about selling food in this country.  Because that’s way beyond seaweed.  That’s just like – it’s a climate problem, right?  The way we manage food and this mass volume of anything that we’re talking about – the monoculture of it all is not healthy for our planet and therefore for us.  I think that some level of that should also be applied to whatever the growth of the seaweed industry is.  My latest Maine seaweed soapbox is something along the lines of seaweed is not kelp.  Kelp is a seaweed.  We are only growing kelp on a line here in the state when we talk about seaweed aquaculture.  But the majority of the public does not understand that.  They are all the same thing.  So there’s an education component to it for sure, but we need to expand beyond that.  We have to expand the many – we sell nine species under this roof, and that’s part of the privilege of working in the wild world, and those are all coming from pretty close to home.  But in the aquaculture world, there’s primarily sugar kelp and there are two other types, but they’re pretty minor.  I know there’s a lot of people working on it, but at the international level, you can pretty quickly discover that red seaweeds are where almost all the money is.  We’ve got to figure that out.  It’s not as easy and there’s a lot more scientific pieces to the puzzle.  And figuring out how to grow it and propagate it and put it out in the water – and it has a different time of year and lifecycle and a lot of other pieces.  But yeah, that’s one of our ways of being resilient is to expand and to not think about – I don’t really want to see 100-acre farms of sugar kelp out there.  I don’t think that’s going to behoove us.

 

Q: [1:06:47] Do you see growing red seaweeds in Maine in the future?

 

A: [1:06:49] Yeah, there’s a bunch of projects happening.  I think it will happen.  Selfishly, in my lifetime, I would love to see an Atlantic-based seaweed sheet.  Doesn’t have to be nori or its cousin, but I think we could get there.  And I think that for the most part, the country’s ready for something like that – a domestic alternative to a sushi sheet.

 

Q: [1:07:14] And are there any other changes that are impacting your work you want to tell us about?

 

A: [1:07:19] Employment.  It is a humongous problem.  Right now, knock on wood, I have a pretty solid team.  I’ve had 10 core employees that have been here from before the pandemic.  I went through about a year and a half of every six months – you know, and it takes up a ton of bandwidth to hire, to train, to then have an exit interview, start all over again.  And there was more – like people just stopped showing up.  People got hired and never arrived for the job.  I don’t even understand.  And then trying to keep up with wage demand and the double-edged sword of everybody who is working wants more money – OK, I get it, because everything at the grocery store and filling your car with gas, whatever it is, is costing more.  On the other side, because we sell into those same grocery stores, we’re seeing sales slow down just a little bit.  So trying to find that middle ground of keeping the employees, keeping them engaged, keeping them happy, not just raising prices to meet all the needs, because then we’re just not selling as much product, which doesn’t help the harvesters.  Like the whole cycle of it is challenging.  But the harvesters are just as challenged by getting the seasonal help that they need in order to get the product in the door from an employment standpoint, too.  And then the expectations of what employees want or need from an employer versus what is actually possible, at least at our scale, is really challenging right now.  And it’s tough.  I hoped that as an employee-ownership business that that would help us, but people have to be able to see a much bigger, longer-term – and I think the burnout post-pandemic is real.  I felt it, too.  I just am not in a position to walk off the job.  Yeah, I don’t know what the answer is.  We’ve been making little shifts, and it’s part of why I wanted to take this leadership course and learn from all these other industries and people, because I feel like the only thing I can control is how I respond to things coming at me.  And the best way to change how I respond is by learning from other people’s experiences – stop living in my own lane and microcosm.

 

Q: [1:09:54] Yeah, you had mentioned another business that you had a hand in.  Can you talk a little about that?

 

A: [1:09:59] Yeah.  So in conjunction with a couple of friends, I’ve bought two pieces of commercial real estate here in downtown Ellsworth.  And we started an LLC and we’re trying to be part of the solution in our older downtown infrastructure by creating good housing and having interesting businesses and not being part of the buy it up and put it on Airbnb only reality.  And, you know, we live in the gateway to Acadia.  We were all seeing that this is a hard challenge.  You know, I appreciate this community, and having grown up here, left, and come back, I really love seeing how much it has evolved into a lot of good things.  So when an opportunity came up, it was one of those gifts where someone said, hey, this person really wants to sell their building, but they only want to sell it to people who live here who don’t want to do X, Y, and Z.  There was no real estate agent involved.  Like it was one of those you’re supposed to do this moments.  I didn’t need another project. (laughter) But it’s also been fun to have something that is not seaweed-related and really about community building and other things that I enjoy and have a different dynamic in my work world.

 

Q: [1:11:28] Can you tell me about any opportunities or positive changes you’ve really experienced with seaweed?

 

A: [1:11:34] Yeah, I mean, I was in middle school, freshman year of high school when my dad was doing recipe development for the cookbook we have.  And I did not like taking my lunches to school.  It was a traumatic experience at that age with those kids.  I went to my high school reunion and I had multiple people walk up and apologize to me and tell me how much their kids love seaweed and how much they realized that – you know, they were just being teenagers and going with the flow, but that we were ahead of the time.  I certainly knew at the time it was kind of traumatic for me, but I clearly moved on.  But it was also really amazing to realize – like that was a big deal they had the self-awareness to even state that.  But it also goes to the bigger piece of just recognizing that seaweed awareness is evolving.  And in my lifetime, you know, we have three Asian restaurants in downtown Ellsworth.  That’s a very big deal comparative to growing up here.  It’s baby steps.

 

Q: [1:12:52] What is your hopeful vision for the future of Maine’s fisheries?

 

A: [1:12:57] That we can look at the fisheries at a bigger, broader ecosystem and their interconnectedness.  I was talking with a research scientist recently.  We were discussing that if the DMR could create – there’s an advisory council to the commissioner for every one of the fisheries.  It was a big deal that in the last 10 years, seaweed finally got its own advisory council of the DMR.  But her suggestion was that then there should be yet another one that has one member of all those fisheries that works together so that they’re also all talking to each other and advising the commissioner at that level.  And her thinking is about this – like we need to be thinking more as an ecosystem.  The last – no, two Sea Grant meetings ago, we were at the DMR, and we got given like maybe 10 five-minute mini-presentations of all the different things that they’re doing, because they’re growing and they just got a whole bunch of new money for a million things.  And that was great, but the whole time I was sitting there, I kept thinking, OK, lovely, you’ve got that reporting.  And great, you’ve got that new technology.  But nobody’s talking about how you’re over here with your scallop dragger, and there goes my kelp bed.  And you’re over here – name all the ways in which they’re harming each other and just listening to that.  I’m like, how can I be the only person thinking this?  I’m sure I was not the only person.  I was just not being vocal about it, and that wasn’t appropriate in that moment.  Collaboration really is what it boils down to – willingness to look beyond just the one fishery and to understand or regulate in a more holistic perspective of the way in which things are all interconnected and stop having it only be this is mine, and I’m the only thing that matters.  Because the fishermen, God bless them, that’s mostly how they behave in whatever their sector is that they’re doing in that moment.  You know, they might participate in five fisheries, but they’re not all happening at the same time.  So as they move through them, that’s the perspective they’re taking.  It’s a probably a pipe dream, but I can live in hope. (laughter)

 

Q: [1:15:36] I was going to ask – do you think that that’s possible?

 

A: [1:15:40] In my lifetime?  I don’t know.  I think it might take a tragedy, unfortunately, and I’d hate to have that be the reason.  But yeah, we’re not – yes, it is possible.  Do I think it’s likely going to manifest?  No.  You know, there’s a lot of things that are possible, but it’s a little along the lines of our dependency on fossil fuel.  It’s going to take something completely drastic and different, probably, to change the course of what’s been happening for so long, and people’s minds, and to understand the value of it.

 

Q: [1:16:22] Have you noticed any changes in women’s presence, participation, or status in fisheries over time?

 

A: [1:16:30] I can’t say I’ve been paying attention deeply until the last decade, but it does seem like there are more women involved.  If I just think about like assistant directors and executive directors I know in a lot of these environments and how many of them are women, I think that probably speaks to a version of what you’re getting at, in that there is a change there.  If you’ve got leadership that’s driven by that mentality, then maybe.

 

Q: [1:17:08] Great.  And is there anything else you wanted to share with us?

 

A: [1:17:13] Seaweed is not going to save the world.  However, it may still be part of our better solution.  But we’re in this weird bubble right now, it seems like, where a lot of people are trying to put that kind of tag onto seaweed, that it is the solution for X, Y, and Z – which, as I stated before, I’m a little concerned could get ahead of us.  But I don’t want the other message to then be it’s not a good, positive thing.  I think our bodies are better for it.  Our planet is potentially better for it.  If our plants are fed with it, then our plants have more nutrition and help us.  If we put it back in the soil, it’s helping the planet from that perspective.  If we’re feeding it to our animals, in spite of all this awful byproduct that many of them are fed, then their coats are happier, their brains are happier.  We’re not getting a lot of the micronutrients that are in seaweed in most of our daily lives.  So I think we could potentially change people’s relationship with food by just replacing a lot of table salt or using it as your preservative in bread as opposed to actual preservatives, and it will last longer.  But here’s the thing – Americans are obsessed with white, bleached.  If you do that to seaweed, you’re removing a lot of the pieces that are going to solve that problem.  So we have this aesthetic part that is a massive holdup for something that in some ways seems so simple.  You don’t need much seaweed to change your diet, actually.  You don’t want to eat it in large volume, because most of us don’t have the enzymes to process it, and it will make us feel kind of icky.  Or it’s so high in iodine that it’s actually not a good idea to eat a large volume of it, at least not on a daily basis.  So yeah, we kind of need to get over ourselves.

 

Q: [1:19:26] Along those lines of – that seaweed’s not going to save the world, I just wonder – you know, seaweeds are both impacted by climate change, but there’s some buzz around, you know, they do sequester carbon, but some of these sort of investments in – looking at it as growing it to sequester carbon and sinking it.  And I know that there are sort of opponents and proponents of that and that it can be kind of controversial within the existing seaweed world in Maine.  So I don’t know if you have any thoughts on sort of the function of seaweed and that sort of like climate mitigation sort of strategies.

 

A: [1:20:00] Yeah, I think that’s a way in which it’s overhyped.  Dr. Nichole Price is somebody who I’ve come to really respect in that realm, and her take on it makes logical sense to me.  I don’t have, again, all those acronyms after my name that she does.  But we don’t know the damage we’re doing by sinking to the bottom of the ocean.  We’re back to this idea that you can put things in the ocean and you’re not changing its ecosystem.  We don’t know enough about what’s under there.  Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you’re not creating impact.  It seems ridiculous to me, quite frankly.  Can we sequester some amount of carbon by eating and evolving seaweed in other ways?  Sure.  But I don’t think that sinking it is a solution.

 

Q: [1:20:55] Great.  Hillary, do you have any other questions?

 

Q: [1:20:57] No, that was my last one.

 

Q: [1:21:00] All right, great.  Then I will stop the recording.

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