Alaska seaweed farmers and oyster growers mingled with professors, tech industry representatives, state and federal government staff, bankers and consultants who converged at Ketchikan’s Ted Ferry Civic Center for the third-ever international Seagriculture USA conference, the first such conference in Alaska.
All eyes of the 190-some conference participants earlier this month were on the promise of developing a profitable seaweed industry in Southeast Alaska, with people traveling to Ketchikan from California, Maine, Canada, The Netherlands, Norway, Vietnam and beyond to learn how they might fit into a regional industry that’s just getting started.
The conference was hosted by DLG Benelux, a German consulting company that puts on a similar meeting in Europe each year.
Two Ketchikan companies launched a new spirit during the seaweed summit. Uncharted Alaska Distillery worked with Seagrove Kelp Co. founder and CEO Markos Scheer, who grows kelp on a large farm south of Craig, to create a special vodka made from fermented sugar kelp.
During a conference presentation on Sept. 11, Scheer described how Alaska’s mariculture industry began with the first commercial production of oysters in Ketchikan in 1910.
In 2017, Alaska saw its first commercial seaweed harvest when two farms near Kodiak harvested kelp for the California-based manufacturer Blue Evolution.
At present, the Alaska seaweed industry “is small, it’s fractured,” Scheer said. “It is spread across broad territories, and individually we don’t produce enough to be relevant in the global marketplace.”
He discussed the need for cooperatives among seaweed farmers in order to provide a reliable, quality supply of seaweed and “produce new products that the market wants.”
Going forward, “need is going to drive growth” and collaboration in the seaweed industry, “whether it be through trade cooperatives or aggregation cooperatives.”
Jenn Brown, founder and CEO of Foraged & Found, a successful kelp salsa and hot sauce brand that harvests kelp near Ketchikan for processing in the Lower 48, spoke about educating buyers and consumers about unfamiliar kelp products and overcoming other industry-wide challenges such as cost competitiveness.
“To tackle cost challenges, we need to focus on efficiency in every step of the supply chain that might involve optimizing cultivation and harvesting methods ... improving processing techniques or finding innovative ways to use kelp rye products to offset costs.”
She explained that Foraged & Found has found success in integrating kelp into familiar food products. “We use kelp in products like pickles and sauces, and that helps introduce consumers to kelp in a familiar context, which can overcome some of the awareness and hesitation problems, but ultimately, the key to successful market integration lies in making kelp an ingredient that’s both easy for manufacturers to use and appealing for consumers to try.”
Ed Douville, CEO of Shaan Seet, spoke about how the village corporation for Craig is working on “quietly developing what we want, which is a mariculture hub” for Prince of Wales Island.
Douville said building infrastructure for processing seaweed or polyculture mariculture crops could help alleviate the “loss of fishing and logging” in communities, while acknowledging that the city of Craig currently does not produce enough power or water to maintain a year-round supply to its seafood processing plant.
A graduate student from Norway discussed his research into genetic diversity in cultured seaweeds, and a representative for the Lithuanian company Sirputis pitched high-tech production equipment such as a processing line that can break up seaweed and deposit it on drying trays, and a grinder that turn lumps of dried seaweed into flakes.
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