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Farming Kelp to Preserve Coastal Communities with Briana Warner
160 Plays2 months ago
This week we were delighted to be joined by Briana Warner, CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms, a regenerative seaweed farming company based in Biddeford, Maine.
Briana walks us through the wondrous potential of kelp to help secure the economic future of fishermen along the coast of Maine, protect our oceans, decarbonize our supply chains, and introduce a nutritious and affordable food source into the broader American diet.
Her work explores many of our favorite themes on this show - climate change adaptability, rural revitalization, the brass tacks of launching a business in the regenerative food space, nutrition, and long term economic security for the people that grow and harvest our food.
In this episode, we cover:
- How her experience with “preventative economic development led her to kelp farming on the coast of Maine.
- The rise of the conservation minded lobster industry and how that lays the groundwork for a US grown kelp industry to diversify economic opportunity for fishermen.
- The environmental volatility that threatens the long term future of the lobster industry and how our predictive capabilities fail in the face of climate change.
- The massive potential industry for a US grown seaweed market.
- The challenges of being a first mover in the food industry and how they’re overcoming it.
- Why they chose a for-profit model over non-profit
- The challenges of finding the right kinds of funders, the lack of funding for female entrepreneurs, and holding firm in the face of outside pressures
- And much more...
Learn more about Atlantic Sea Farms.
Follow them on LinkedIn and Instagram.
More about Briana:
Briana Warner is the President and CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms (ASF), the leading commercial kelp aquaculture company in the United States. Following a career working overseas as a diplomat for the U.S. Department of State, she saw an opportunity to help create a more resilient and thriving coast by partnering with fishermen seeking to diversify their income in the face of climate change by growing kelp and building an entirely new market for domestic kelp. The ASF team and partner farmers now account for the majority of the farmed kelp grown in the US and are proving that by putting farmers, planet, and people first, a company can drive a market and can do well while doing good.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song.
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
When we think that our only way we can solve climate change is by doing something grand when we all are just trying to live our lives, it makes it a lot harder for people to take action. But there's real power in taking action with just your everyday activities and just trying to do a little bit better. And I think that that's my parting words for people is just go buy kelp, go buy food that makes the plan a little bit better. Even if you have to buy chicken you don't really believe in because that's what you can afford, maybe then that next piece that you put into your cart can be a different choice, right? It doesn't have to be perfect. You can just be a little bit better every time. And I think we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of just trying to be a little bit better.
00:00:51
Speaker
You are listening to Agrarian Futures, a podcast exploring a future centered around land, community, and connection to place. I'm Emma Ratcliffe. And I'm Austin Unruh. And on the show, we chat with farmers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other to showcase real hope and solutions for the future.
00:01:20
Speaker
Welcome Bri to the podcast. We're super excited to be talking with you today. We've been following what you've been doing at Atlantic Sea Farms for a while. And I know that you're not originally from Maine. You grew up in Pennsylvania, but moved to Maine a number of years ago and are through Atlantic Sea Farms trying to play a role in the economic development of the lower coastal area of Maine. So could you start off by giving us a brief introduction about who you are and also why Atlantic Sea Farms and why kelp in Maine? Yeah, emmetz thank you so much for having me on it's really good to see you and and to be here appreciate you inviting me and I'm sitting up here in late June in Maine which is actually our down season we just finished up harvest season so.
00:02:04
Speaker
Unlike the rest of farming, we're actually in our slower season right now than everybody else who's out there getting their fields prepped and ready here in Maine. So my background is in economic development. Like you said, I'm from Pennsylvania and I moved up to Maine about 11 years ago. But prior to that, I was working in the U.S. Foreign Service as a diplomat. in My background is in economic development, so just working on post-conflict economic recovery for different communities and what that looks like in different countries, mostly in West and Central Africa. and and of An emerging theme that has come up in all the work that I've done is this thought around preventative economic development. So often in the world when we think about economic development, we think about cleaning up messes after they happen.
00:02:47
Speaker
and so rarely do we look at anything preventative and that's not just an economic development right you're hearing all these. Kind of words out about preventative health care by like eating good food and exercising and preventing disease rather than just treating the disease but still in economic development we talk about treating the disease instead of kind of trying to prevent it and. This has been true throughout American history, of throughout world history. We don't pay attention to problems until they're right on top of us. and On an 89-degree day in June in Maine, which doesn't historically happen, it's very obvious to me today, but every day, that global warming is going to fundamentally shift the way that we work here in Maine. and In fact, the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 98 percent of oceans in the world,
00:03:38
Speaker
So it is in every sense of the word at the forefront of coastal climate change and what that will look like. So for me here, my focus has been, should we write the book that everybody has written on climate change of, you know, sticking our head in the sands and pretending things don't exist and continuing to do things the way they do until they're no longer available for us to do or. do we try to write a new book and try to write a new story? And writing the old story in some ways is easier because it's a playbook that everybody knows. Writing a new story and you know forging a new path is something that's much harder, but that's what we're trying to do here in Maine. And we're doing it through the avenue of kelp farming, but the way that we're doing it is much bigger than kelp.
00:04:21
Speaker
Bri, would you be able to give us a little bit more context into the fisheries industry in Maine and what the historical arc has looked like over the last, whatever, 50 years or 100 years as people have fished for different things and maybe cultivated different things and where we are at now? There's this great book called The Lobster Coast that I would highly recommend to your your listeners if they ever get a chance to read it, but it's basically about the history of coastal communities in Maine and how we've kind of always existed as a ah small boat fisheries here. You know, we don't have big fleets. We don't have
00:04:57
Speaker
this kind of belief system as most of the fishing fleets in the country are big fleets that go out that are owned by one person that consolidate you know all of the quotas and overfish the industry. That's just not how we're set up in Maine. It's not how we've ever been set up. and In fact, when people think of Maine, they often think of lobster and it has the added benefit of being the case. We are a lobster state. It is a monoculture for us. It wasn't always a monoculture. There did used to be you know fishing fleets that were here with large-scale ground fishing permits, but for the past about 30 years, lobster has very much become the dominant fishery, and there's there's a number of reasons. One,
00:05:36
Speaker
Because it is a small boat fishery, it's owner-operator, meaning nobody can fish on your boat but you. If you have the license, no one can be operating your boat and fishing for lobster except the license holder. So there's that piece. The second piece is it's a generational fishery. It's very, very difficult to get into the industry. One of the only ways you can do so is by apprenticing. and who's apprenticing was who's able to apprentice with someone other than somebody's kid or nephew or niece or family because there's a lot of lot of hours of apprenticing that needs to happen. And then the third is that because it's a generational fishery and because it's a small boat fishery, we put regulations in place that mean that we're putting egg-bearing females back in the water. We are
00:06:18
Speaker
having an upper and lower size limit to replace the brooding stock. I mean, it's been incredibly conservation minded. So what that's meant is in the past 20 years, we've seen 10 of the best years in lobster have been in the past 20 years. Now, last year was one of the lowest landings in the last 30 years. So while that arc has seen this kind of glut of lobsters move through the Gulf of Maine, it's not as if they're sort of moving north, migrating north, kind of putting on their backpacks and moving up. Just the lobster larvae are no longer going to survive at the rate that they are now because the water is getting warmer. The lobster population would be lower if we weren't fishing it.
00:06:58
Speaker
Nonetheless, we're going to see such a steady decline in the lobster fishery because of that warming water that we're facing a pretty different future if we're not acting to think about ways that we can diversify that income. And you say that this is a monoculture of lobster at this point. That's really the main thing that folks are going after. And it sounds like in past generations that there was a greater diversity of fish that people would go after um and that those have been depleted. Is that because those fish, they travel much further and other areas might not have the same conservation values or those populations weren't stewarded as well as the lobster have been in Maine.
00:07:36
Speaker
you know I think also even in Maine, I don't think those fleets, you know the ground fish industry was stewarded in the way that the lobster industry is. The the lobster industry is pretty is pretty unique, but also climate change has really been a significant factor in in the depletion as well. and Plus, you know when you think about ground fish species, you look past that three mile line of a state line and you're in federal waters and anyone can fish there. right so For a number of reasons that fishery just doesn't exist in the same way it used to but we're not seeing that just here i mean in in alaska for example you saw kind of the overnight disappearance of snow crab and everyone was kind of it was anticipating that there would be a slow decline but it just wasn't there when you're because the crab larvae weren't surviving.
00:08:20
Speaker
And no one really has answers as to why. And I think that's what's so fascinating about predictive capabilities on the water is that we can only predict what we know historically to be true. And we can look at trends, but climate change is unprecedented. What we're seeing right now is so unprecedented that our predictive capabilities are only as good as our past experience, which is not very good when you're looking at a future that becomes increasingly more volatile. and um That's the fear of climate change. I think you know we see all these perspectives about, like oh, the war the earth is warming. Yes, but it's not warming at this sort of consistent pace. What's so terrifying about climate change is it's not predictable.
00:09:00
Speaker
And it's causing just incredible volatility and natural resources in general, but in our case, the fisheries here in Maine are seeing just massive swings from year to year. Yeah, Austin and I are more involved in farming, but it's the same there. It's really about being able to have enough diversity to be able to adapt to different conditions that we can't predict. And it's funny to hear how similar it is in fisheries with the monocultures and just not having any sort of diversity to lean back on as the climate is changing in unpredictable ways.
00:09:32
Speaker
As the general fishing population and industry has been declining in Maine through careful management of permits and the apprentice model and conservation efforts, the lobster industry has been thriving, but it's a monoculture and at risk. That's obviously where kelp comes in. ah Could you tell us a little bit about your journey to Atlantic sea farms and how how they're coming in to solve that issue or mitigate that issue maybe I would say? yeah I started working with the lobster industry about 10 years ago now, and there is a lot of concern here at that time, and I think increasingly so now, that we are so dependent on ah on a fishery that is going to become increasingly volatile over time and is already seeming that way. so The big question was, what are some of the diversification activities that can be done in order for people to get more resilient forms of income to help absorb some of the shock of that fishery?
00:10:28
Speaker
And so I started working with the fishing industry to better understand what those opportunities might be and kind of help open up those pathways. So we looked into oyster aquaculture, mussel aquaculture, scallop aquaculture, and all of those presented strong opportunities for fishermen to enter, but there were pretty significant misalignments with those industries. Like oysters, for example, is Done mostly intertidal and in main we have great oysters they fetch a higher dollar than anywhere else but one of the reasons is they're hard to grow up here we have big diox because it's so cold and it takes so many years to get to market because it is so cold muscles you just need to scale significantly which is a massive capital outlay in order to make any money i mean it's it's a cheap commodity product.
00:11:15
Speaker
And then scallops is sort of still a little bit unproven on the aquaculture side. But kelp, it's being grown all over the globe, not in the United States. that In 2018, in fact, there was only 30,000 pounds grown in the entire country. But it was you know it's in the off-season of fishermen. We could make the whole industry on the back of lobster boats. You know you could turn those those lobster boats into tractors of the sea fairly easily. The kelp season is counter seasonal to the lobster season so it's at a time when they can maximize both their stern men as well as their you know leverage their own resources like their boats and their knowledge to to to be deployed when they otherwise wouldn't be fishing so.
00:11:54
Speaker
It felt like the perfect opportunity, especially at the time when seaweed as a food product was becoming increasingly popular. so Nielsen measured seaweed as an input. Emma, I think this is after you and I spoke last, so i it's kind of an exciting piece here, is that Nielsen finally did a study of of seaweed as as a food. and That's just at retail checkout, things called seaweed. or Nori or Kelp, you know, things with seaweed in the name. And this doesn't count restaurants. It doesn't count universities. It doesn't count grab and go, but just seaweed things that you can buy in a grocery store is a $1.2 billion dollars industry. And that's in the United States. So clearly there's a market for this. People are eating it. And it's mostly in the form of seaweed snacks, Nori wraps and sushi, and that bright green seaweed salad that has all the dyes in it that's in Mountain Dew. So
00:12:47
Speaker
You have three product forms at $1.2 billion, dollars and none of it is from the US. There's no innovation in it, and people are already eating it sort of almost addictively. right Kids eating those seaweed snacks, like you see them everywhere. I have a six- and eight-year-old, and they just like go right to the seaweed snack aisle and just start snacking. and so There was this opportunity, as we saw, out of more coastline than the state of California and in the coast of Maine, 4,000 plus lobster license holders with perfect equipment to go out and kelp, and an industry that didn't exist here with the clean cold waters of Maine. and so It felt to us, me and many fishermen, like this was the opportunity. The problem was, in order to farm kelp, just like farming anything else, you need seeds.
00:13:31
Speaker
And just like anything else, you need logistics. And just like any other food industry, you need someone to process it into something. Nobody knows how to eat a handful of seaweed. I would dare anyone to try to sell a half a pound of raw seaweed on the shelf next to the kale, like no one would have any idea what to do with it. It's more like a wheat right where it needs to be value added for someone to know how to eat it. and so That's where the idea for Atlantic Sea Farms came up because there was we had to fill these gaps in order to make this a viable industry for fishermen to get in. and This year, we just landed 1.3 million pounds of kelp.
00:14:06
Speaker
And that's up from 30,000 in 2018. So we're making a go of it. it's still While it's about 85% of the farmed kelp in America, it's probably about 0.001% of all the farmed seaweed in the world. But you know it's it's the first kind of domestic product available at any scale. And we're pretty excited that fishermen are the ones growing it. And you've taken somewhat of an unusual model, vertically integrated, and also guaranteeing the offset to fishermen, guaranteeing to buy from them ahead of knowing what you're going to sell. Could you talk a little bit more about your business model?
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, you know we're the only buyers at scale in the country, and so if we're not guaranteed purchase, no one's going to grow. So we had to kind of figure out, like okay, how do you get a bunch of people? you know There's always going to be the first movers, right the first two or three fishermen who are doing it because they're interested and they trust me and we know each other and they want to try something new and model something for other generations and they're fine if they lose a little bit of money, right? But you can't build an industry on those people. There's only a handful out there. So you get those first people and then you try to figure out how to get them to make money so that then becomes inspirational for others because
00:15:17
Speaker
Never have we recruited fishermen by saying, this is good for climate change. right like We need to be able to show that this is a potential to allow their kids to stay on the water in 20 years and that there's a viable income stream here because it's hard work. It's in the middle of the winter in Maine. It is so cold and it is so miserable and it is so hard. No one's going to go do it just for the love of farming kelp. But if this is a real income earning opportunity, then we have an industry. so We've modeled it around that, so we give out free seeds to our partner farmers. We guarantee purchase of what they grow. And then we do all the logistics and manufacturing here in a 27,000 square foot facility in in Southern Maine. So we are very vertically integrated in its
00:16:01
Speaker
It's definitely unique. There are some similarities with maybe an ocean spray, which is a farmer co-op that does cranberries. I think most people think of them as a big scary conglomerate when in fact they're like a really pretty innovative revolutionary farmer co-op. They've been real big brothers to us. They've helped us build out our facility and think through how we work with farmers and how to do logistics. And then another group like Wyman's of Maine. It's a wild blueberry. If you're eating wild blueberries, you're probably eating them from Maine and just learning from those who have forged the path in front of us. So while it's really different because it's on the water, I think we're in company of a handful of really incredible companies that are able to show us how to do it correctly.
00:16:42
Speaker
And obviously kelp is new in the US s but it's existed in many other parts of the world for thousands of years. Did you look to how it works in places like Korea and Japan as you're developing in your business models and what are some of the lessons maybe you learned from those places? Yeah, not at first. I wish we could have, but we kind of there was a company called Ocean Approved, which was the first commercial seaweed farm in the country, which is now Atlantic Sea Farms. It was two guys sort of just trying to figure out how to grow kelp in the United States. and then it Eventually, you know I took over as CEO. It was turned into Atlantic Sea Farms and changed our model. but
00:17:20
Speaker
That was kind of the only open source information about how to farm seaweed at the time. and And it was based loosely on what people could deduce from the time of not particularly fast public information internet and not a whole lot of information. It is only now that we're starting to get the opportunities to actually learn from the people who've been doing it for 400 years. So the World Wildlife Fund sent me and my supply manager and um one of our partner farmers last year to Korea and what was so crazy to us as we went there and their processing was so much more sophisticated and their logistics were so much more sophisticated and their seeds were so much more sophisticated. But the farming was exactly the same. And fishermen are fishermen and farmers are farmers and it was really amazing to see
00:18:05
Speaker
how many similarities there are in the way that we're doing it. Now, they're slightly different vessels, but we have been able to benefit from that. and We actually just had another group that was paid for through the Builders Initiative out in San Diego, just allowed three of our partner farmers and three others of our staff to go to Japan to learn a little bit more about their industry. so We have a lot to learn. Like I said, we're we're kind of walking the footsteps of giants in a lot of ways, but I think the way we're doing it puts our partner farmers first, and it puts this idea around climate change adaptation as kind of a primary tactic and tool. And I think that's what's fundamentally really different about the way that we're doing it than than other people. The models there, but not the way we're doing it. you know We're taking fishermen that are still doing well, that are still fishing for lobster and still making a good income. And we're kind of looking to figure out how to ensure that we're not
00:18:58
Speaker
seeing a collapse of that fishery, but instead figuring out ways to absorb the impact of that fishery in it. That to me is what gets me out of bed every morning to write that new book. That's quite hard to write. So can you give us a little bit of the background of why you chose to go with a private for-profit business as the vehicle for change? The goal here is not for anyone to become really rich. The goal is really for the purpose of sustainable fisheries, sustainable for fishermen to be on the the water for the long-term, for generations to come.
00:19:30
Speaker
So can you give us some background as to why you chose the model that you did rather than a nonprofit organization that's spurring on this industry or maybe a fishermen-owned co-op or something like that? Yeah, there's definitely co-op models that are interesting to me, but as far as a nonprofit organization, like what what are we proving by living on grant cycles and taking kind of handouts and talking about something, but not walking the walk at all. There are certain areas that are always going to have to be nonprofit focused and maybe childhood hunger. There's maybe not an economic way to solve that without nonprofits. there There are a lot of different ways that nonprofits play incredibly important roles.
00:20:12
Speaker
When it comes to business nonprofits in my view are way out over their skis and and we aren't we're not proving anything if we're just getting donations to do things that actually have market answers and what we're trying to prove is that there is a market answer here i want this industry to be here for the children of the fishermen were working through i want this to be a generational fishery. And that's not going to happen on a bunch of grand cycles. The way that we know this has worked is when Atlantic Sea Farms is wildly successful. right If we're making a lot of money, we have proven something that you can do well by doing good. We're not there yet. And we have a lot of learning to do, I think, before we get there. But if we're able to pull this off in the way that I know we are, we are going to prove something really, really different and to show that business can do well.
00:21:05
Speaker
and do good is is something that I think is unfortunately too rarely unproven in the US. This is an instance where you're doing very significant good in a community. A lot of businesses will say that they're doing good and it's kind of a token thing that they're doing. like Their main goal is making money and maybe the thing that they're doing has a little bit of a positive effect or they're giving away 1% for the planet. But in this case, and similar to what I'm doing with my company where we're planting trees into pastures, like it's a for-profit company working with farmers so that the farmers can be on the land long term. It's the same vision. In this case, everything that you do, if your work succeeds, by the very nature of it, you're having a beneficial impact on your community and on the the ecosystems.
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think I always am shocked when I get reached out to by like 1% from the planet or any of these other certifications. I'm like, is that all just 1%? Is that really the best we can do? And then we're going to stamp that on the front of something with pride like that. Sorry, but I couldn't possibly, I have a six and an eight year old. How could I possibly turn to them and say, yeah, but I did 1% for the planet. how is this where we're at? And I'm not bashing that organization. I mean, they are making, they're able to get money to do things that are good from people who otherwise maybe aren't doing so much good. I think there's a lot to be proud of of that organization and what they've done. But when we're in a society where that is the gold standard, we're doing something fundamentally wrong. And
00:22:39
Speaker
you know Kelp is farmed with no arable land, no freshwater, no pesticides. It's regenerative to its environment, meaning there's all these studies from Bigelow Laboratories and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and that are validated around the fact that the halo of the kelp farm is actually removing carbon and nitrogen from the water column. So I'm not saying sequestration. Sequestration is a completely different animal. But in that kelp halo, We're actually mitigating some of the effects of climate change locally by lowering the pH of the area. Shell-bearing organisms are showing significant life changes within the kelp halo, meaning their shell strength is bigger, their meat strength is bigger. There's so much about the ecosystem services that kelp's providing, and it's not putting any negative inputs into the water, and it's allowing an alternative income source. like
00:23:29
Speaker
There's no skeletons here. Now, we do use diesel to fuel the reefer trucks. We're working on it. right we we We're working within the system we're giving. We bring it back and we put it in a cold storage. That sucks. like There are things we got to figure out on that side, but you know I think those are more kind of systematic issues that we need to chip away at over time. But I think We're really proud to be able to be contributing in a way that we feel like is producing the most climate friendly food on the planet, honest and and true. and I think to be able to say that is pretty incredible to be able to stand behind. and I don't think we need to go as far as to say sequestration because of course, when you're eating kelp, you're not sequestering it. but
00:24:10
Speaker
There's a lot of incredible mitigation effects we're doing, and when you're putting it on your plate, it's literally better than any other food you can put on your plate to eat for the planet while also providing these adaptation opportunities. so Also, we're seeing millennials and Gen Zs in particular buy foods that make them feel like they're contributing to the planet. and I think there's been a large movement beyond organic, beyond 1% toward regenerative, towards whole systems focus. and Right now, unfortunately, it tends to be mostly with the very educated and very rich that are able to afford these foods. But as they become you know more universal and more to scale, hopefully, we'll see some price points come down and we'll start to be able to see more systems change throughout all of American society.
00:24:55
Speaker
What's so powerful about your model, and I imagine also so challenging, is the fact that you're not taking an industry that's a given and just trying to create a product on top of it. You're building out the entire supply chain, including the seed stock and the varieties on the R and&D side, and then the whole processing infrastructure distribution. How has that been, and particularly how has that been in terms of finding the financing to do that when it sounds like It's something that takes a really long-term vision in a world where more and more of the financing that we see is focused on quick turnover and quick 10x profits.
00:25:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head, Emma. You know, two years ago when Beyond Meat and Impossible and RX Bars were suddenly showing for the first time pretty much in history these kind of 10X returns for food. I think that there had been a growing excitement around impact in food for about 10 years prior, but it was a reasonable expectation of return. When all these companies started showing this almost tech-like J-curve of growth and return, like kind of the impact, I say in air quotes, which you can't see on on a podcast, but you know this kind of impact capital rushed into food all of a sudden, being like, oh, we can create impact and get 10x returns. That was never going to be real.
00:26:23
Speaker
and and Now we see the ashes of that from all these companies just crashing and burning because it was never something that people actually wanted. Nobody wants lab food. It's just not something that it was really cool. It was almost like a cool experiment for a year or two, and then everyone went back to eating actual food. you know and Then you see things like actual veggies come on the shelf and kind of take off because people are like, oh God, thank you food. That is food that I know where it's coming from. and so I think what you're seeing now is food bouncing back out to where we would expect a 3X return, 2X, 3X, 4X return, and that's not attractive to the same people that it used to be. so You have all these businesses that were really formed on this idea that they were going to be 10X, and that was what you had to put in front of people, and that was what you're like, okay, we can do this. If they can do this, we can too. and Then the market sort of corrected itself.
00:27:16
Speaker
Possibly over corrected i think we're right now in an over correction phase that's gonna come back to the middle but. That makes with the fact that we have incredibly high interest rates where food is very expensive for people people are experimenting in their food choices and we're seeing this kind of very unequal. distribution of wealth where in this time right now the wealthy are actually getting wealthier while the poor are less likely to be able to afford their food baskets they were before and they can't buy houses. and so you know The market economics that were true beforehand have just been exacerbated to the extreme and food is still not a 10x growth opportunity. so
00:27:54
Speaker
To say it's been difficult over the last year is almost an understatement. you know And and then I think just to add to it, and I think this goes without saying that less than 2% of all venture funding went to women-run companies last year. That's down. The statistics are getting worse. They've been getting worse for five years. I hear all the time. some of my favorite entrepreneurs were women i'm like cool how big is their business cuz i bet you they have fifty thousand dollar investments you know they're not looking at these kind of like seventeen nineteen twenty five million dollar venture cap investments cuz they're not getting that money and.
00:28:28
Speaker
I think that we expect female entrepreneurs to kind of exist in microfinance, not in sort of the big colossal deals that male CEOs are given. so I think all those things combined have me exhausted, but we are closing on around this Friday. and ASF has ah has a bright future, but it's been a pretty devastating look at what impact capital truly is because the promise of impact at 10x returns, is just ah it's a false promise. And I think that you know true impact is when you're okay with tripling your investment, quadri even quadrupling your investment, and that's pretty damn good. But maybe we don't need to also victimize our food chain on a 10-time investment return, because then what are we actually growing? Growth at all costs doesn't serve anybody.
00:29:18
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds so good. Make just as much money, but also do good. I mean, who who doesn't want that? But I'd be curious to hear a little bit more on that. You've obviously raised money from venture funds, social impact focused. I imagine you've also here and there received some grant money. There's probably been a few other forms of capital that you've worked with. In a more ideal world, what kind of capital would be available for businesses like yours that would allow you to most effectively focus on growing your business in a way that is sustainable and good for the community that you're trying to serve?
00:29:50
Speaker
Yeah, we've been lucky to have a combination of all the things. and you know We have really, really strong and focused angel investors, folks who are you know really concerned about the future of our food systems and want to be investing in a way that is thoughtful for their own wallet, but also for the world around them and creating a better world through these 50, 100, 150 to 250 investments. The largest driver of our business is these kind of very thoughtful angel individuals who are looking to create a better planet and for me those are the type of investors that I value really really strongly but we've also gotten funding from incredible impact groups so there's this group in Austin called true wealth ventures that only invest in women run companies it's all women managers.
00:30:37
Speaker
and Their whole kind of ethos is around the fact of, like we're only going to invest in better in women-run companies because it's a better investment. Prove me wrong. right like and They've just totally proven their portfolio performance too. and so Groups like that are groups like Builders Initiative from the Walton family looking to invest in oceans. so We've had some great venture involvement, also some foundations like the Sewell Foundation, which is focused on creating a more resilient coastline in the state of Maine, and they have an impact capital wing, and then just some straight venture impact capital like a group called Desert Bloom Foods who led our last round, who's looking at food systems investing. so That along with good support from local banks who fund most of the lobster industry and they're looking for their own sort of mitigation opportunities,
00:31:25
Speaker
as well as grant funds from the state mostly that have allowed us to continue to do some really important research and development. and so We do have this kind of mixed bag and investment, which I think has allowed us to survive some pretty tough times. People who are backed by one large private equity group or one large venture fund, you know I don't think that they have the same resilience as a group like us. I think that's been hugely to our advantage. but Very few people are investing in Kelp because they think it's going to turn around next year into a hundred million dollar company. And so I think it's a little bit self-selecting of really great people who want to do great things while also making a very serious investment for themselves. And i I've been very lucky to be surrounded by incredible people in that way. Would you say that the financing is the largest bottleneck in order to scale this industry and scale what you're doing in particular, or is it some other part of the business?
00:32:21
Speaker
Yeah, anytime someone asks me that, it's like um it's just a moment in time because there's different challenges depending on the moment. you know Right now, I would say funding, yes, but you know in three weeks, I'll be like, it's definitely product form or it's definitely manufacturing. I think as true first movers, I think when I started this business, I underestimated what it meant to be a first mover. You are taking all the headwinds. And so, you're learning as you go because you don't know what else is out there then layer on top of that COVID being thrown at you when you're a food service delivery company right like you just, it's kind of like step by step and then launching a retail brand when you're not able to do demos in the grocery store because everyone's wearing masks and
00:33:06
Speaker
Some of the issues we've had are the same exact issues that any other brand would have. Those are the ones that feel the best. You're like, Oh, okay. I'm surrounded. Like granola is having this problem too. Like we can do this, right? But some of the kind of very specific to us, it's that. There's nobody else to process this kelp. There's no one else to do the seed. there's no one else to do you know If we don't grow enough, there's nowhere else to buy it. It's full systems investing. so As a part of that, you know you you kind of scale up one thing and then you realize that you have to scale up the next thing. so Two years ago, I would have said supply was our issue. This year, we landed 300,000 pounds more than we meant to because we've gotten really good at farming, but it was also you guys know farming. It was also just a good year. and no one can predict good years. They can predict good years just as bad as they can predict bad years, right? And we're getting better at the seed and the farmers are getting better at farmers. So now I will say our biggest problem is trying to make sure that we're getting the right products that people want to buy them at at scale. We have a lot of condiments right now, which are delicious products and people love them, but you only buy a condiment once a month. You buy like a seaweed salad once a month. It's great.
00:34:12
Speaker
Now, how do we get more habitual use products onto the market or in our ingredient space for supplying powder to nutraceuticals? And for the last two years, startup food companies have had such a hard time that a lot of the partnerships we had been working on sort of have a failure to launch because those companies never were able to get funding to get off the ground or get continued funding to continue their products. so I would say, you know right now, I would say it's funding, but then shortly after just making sure that we have the right type of funding and we're deploying resources in a way to get the products out to market that are more widely accepted and exciting. And we've sort of built the space of incredible ambassadors on the ground. I mean, the devotion to Atlantic Sea Farms is high.
00:34:54
Speaker
We get letters from people. We get love notes from people. Some people met over our sea veggie burger, and then that's all they served at their wedding a few months ago. like it was like we get like People are devoted to what we're doing. But you know getting something out there that people are eating every day is probably the next step. But you know Atlantic Sea Farms 2.0, now that we have the supply to support it. That makes sense with you guys being completely vertically integrated and needing to build the entire infrastructure for it that you need to move everything forward at the same time. And there's inevitably some things move forward faster or you're able to make a bigger jump and then everything else has to catch up.
00:35:31
Speaker
That's exactly it. And I suspect that's going to be the case for the next 10 years. And we just need to be able to see around the corners. And I think you know in the sort of funding world that we've been in for the last two years, it's made it a little bit harder to afford yourself the opportunity to see around the corners in the way that you want. But I think things are starting to write themselves a little bit. Well, I can vouch for the quality of your products. I took my homework very seriously in preparation for this interview and I went out and got some Seechee and I downed about half of it in one sitting. It was fantastic. ah So I will gladly vouch for high quality product and absolutely fantastic taste.
00:36:12
Speaker
Thank you. We just put out a spicy gochujang last summer that has quickly risen to the top of my heap. It's a spicy gochujang seaweed salad. So if you get a chance, they're available in all Whole Foods nationally. They're all great products, but that one has been sort of on my eggs and sandwiches pretty much every day for the past nine months. I will have my eye out for it. So you guys landed 300,000 pounds of kelp more than you expected this year, and you're in the process of building out your sales in your different markets. What does that breakdown look like right now in terms of retail versus ingredients, wholesale, and how you thinking about it going forward as well?
00:36:51
Speaker
Going forward, we'd like to see around 50-50 because retail products are great for telling our story and getting people to try kelp in new funky ways. you know Really understanding that there's three products sold in one quarter of 15 aisles of the grocery store. We have 14.5 aisles of white space that should have kelp in them. you know We should have it in chips, we should have it in popcorn, we should have it in you know anchovies. This is a super unsustainable fishery. This should be in Caesar salad instead. It's green, it's vegan, and it's sustainable. you know there's you can kind of put a little bit of kelp everywhere. And that's not just because I'm a kelp person. It really does that kind of sixth sense that we didn't realize was a thing in America until about 10 years ago, apparently umami. Like this was not a flavor profile that we grew up knowing, even though the Japanese have known about this forever. And suddenly Asian flavors are really expanding in America because people are realizing that that umami flavor is really important to taste buds and it's delicious and addicting.
00:37:45
Speaker
Kelp is umami. That's where you get it. You get it from mushrooms, fish, and kelp. So we can kind of see it being everywhere and working both with our retail products to show people how it can be used in an innovative way in a very kelp forward composition. So everything we're putting out is at least 60, 70% kelp. Whereas working with folks like cracker companies who are sprinkling a little bit on their crackers or in rice bowl mixes or in salad dressings, or we're working with private label on a spinach artichoke dip with kelp in it instead of spinach, you know, it's like.
00:38:21
Speaker
Could you kind of get this umami flavor throughout the grocery store? so We are looking to and maybe about two years be 50-50. Right now, our retail is slightly more dominant than our ingredient. About 70 percent of our sales are actually in retail products. But also with the benefit of the retail, people then know the Atlantic Sea Farms brand, and then they can pick up their iodine pill from Blue Bonnet and look on the side and see the feature about Atlantic Sea Farms, and they know that they can trust what they're eating versus Kelp that has no traceability from God knows where got grown in what water, you know, it gives people this idea that there is a supplier out there with a face and a name that then they can trace back to that ingredient input that they're using for their nutraceuticals or on top of their chips. So I'm in New York where there's a lot of sushi, but I'm guessing it's not coming from Maine. What does it look like breaking into the market that's currently met by these imports coming from Korea, Japan, China, and how does that look like in terms of price point especially?
00:39:17
Speaker
Yeah, we have never tried to actually break into the same market. So when people ask about our competition, you know, we say for our sea veggie burgers, we're competing against Hillary's and, you know, other veggie burgers, kelp cubes are competing with Samsung or blueberries. Even though these are all people that are are friends, like Dr. Prager's, we talk to them constantly and Wyman's is, you know, always on the line with us. so Those are kind of our biggest competitors are fermented that we're competing mostly with kimchis that are imported or you know some sauerkrauts or pickles or those kind of things but this year we're launching a seaweed salad that's in a clam shell not fermented frozen it's the first time we've gone head to head with an import.
00:39:58
Speaker
on seaweed and our price point is actually cheaper and it doesn't have any dyes in it and the stuff that's imported is imported dried, it's rehydrated. That's why they have to add all the stuff in it that's in Mountain Dew to make it that green color because otherwise it looks like, you know, kind of dead jellyfish. It doesn't have a lot of color to it because it's dried and rehydrated versus our product, which is fresh, blanched, frozen, and then it's slacked off on the shelf. So they'll be launching in several hanafruit stores in a few months, and then they'll be launching in grocery chains from there, just in the grab and go sushi area. So that's the first time that we'll have seen an analog to what else is out there. And from a price point perspective, it's actually slightly cheaper. So we're excited to finally be at the point where we're able to do that. But I don't have a lot of answers because because we haven't done a direct competition before, and I'm excited to see where we sit.
00:40:48
Speaker
It's a much better product, and it's much better for you. And I think the color of it kind of says it on its own. And on the front, we make it really clear, like, hey, this is grown here in the US. It's woman run. It's completely traceable. It doesn't have dyes in it. And you can trust all the ingredients by this. And we'll see how it works. What do you see as, let's say, the next five years for Atlantic Sea Farms? What are the challenges that you have ahead? And where do you hope to be in five years when we have this conversation again? ah you know What I want to be able to say is we have 100 farmers farming 100,000 pounds each and making real viable incomes in the Gulf of Maine and Alaska. and American kelp has been taken up by you know McDonald's where we're eating it on our plates every day and everyone's just getting a little bit of that nutrient-dense food that's helping the planet every day. I think that sounds far-fetched, but it's really not.
00:41:42
Speaker
When you look at the Asian, in fact, even if we just take McDonald's, one of the best selling potato chips in Asia is the kelp dusted potato chip and it's by Lays. We're not that far out. We need to be patient. We need to be thoughtful and we need to be really focused on the issue at hand, which is climate change adaptation. and creating a more decarbonized supply chain. And I think if we can continue to focus on those two goals and try to find the tactics that make that widely appealing to the average consumer that maybe doesn't even care about the future, but man, that kelp tastes good. I'm going to eat it. That's how we solve it is when people don't even realize that kelp is good for you and they don't realize it's good for the planet, but they eat it anyway.
00:42:25
Speaker
Yeah, make it easier for people. Not that it it will be easy to adapt to climate change, but I think a lot of people are paralyzed by how hard it is right now to change your eating habits, your lifestyle. So anything that changes the system a little bit to make it just a little bit easier to adapt the right measures is, I think, key. Maybe to finish us off, you've obviously taken taken a very unconventional entrepreneurial path, building an industry from scratch. What would you say to someone that is thinking about starting a business focused on climate adaptation in a kind of unproven space? What words of wisdom would you have for them? The only thing that can give you validation is what you're doing every day and what you value and to keep your head on the values, because you're not going to get validation
00:43:12
Speaker
widely around you when you're doing something really different. All you're going to get is people questioning it. And there's going to be some people in the trenches with you and stick with those people and love those people and lean into those people and learn from those people. Because if they're in the trenches with you, it means they believe in the same vision that you do. It's not easy to do this work. You know, I'm a single mom of two boys. This is for them, but also I'm, this is everything I do, that and this, that's it, right? What do I do in my spare time is parent and work.
00:43:44
Speaker
like kids There's no life there. But I know what I'm doing is, you know, support a better future for them and be able to turn to them and tell them that I'm passing them a better future than what they otherwise would have had. If I can do that, then that makes it worth it. But if I lose sight of what I'm trying to do, it's pretty easy to get your head down. I'm pretty easy to get discouraged and pretty easy to get frustrated, but just keeping your eye on what you're trying to do and believing in yourself. Perfect. I love it. Bri, before we wrap up, um is there anything else that you would like to share with folks? Any parting, just a message from Atlantic Sea Farms or anything else that you would like to share with folks?
00:44:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think the biggest thing I always want to share with people is that there is hope and that there's we can choose to either get discouraged by the stories about climate change or we can use it as a way to optimize action. And action doesn't always look like going out with picket signs. It doesn't always look like radical commitment to a better climate future. In fact, a lot of times it's just going to the grocery store and making the better choice. And I think that when we think that our only way we can solve climate change is by doing something grand when we all are just trying to live our lives, it makes it a lot harder for people to take action. But there's real power in taking action with just your everyday activities and just trying to do a little bit better.
00:45:09
Speaker
And I think that that's my parting words for people is just go buy kelp, go buy food that makes the plant a little bit better. Even if you have to buy chicken you don't really believe in because that's what you can afford, maybe then that next piece that you put into your cart can be a different choice, right? It doesn't have to be perfect. You can just be a little bit better every time. And I think we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of just trying to be a little bit better.
00:45:36
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice. As a new podcast, it's crucial for helping us reach more people. You can visit agrarianfuturespod dot.com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content.