From tangled piles of bull kelp to blankets of bright green sea lettuce, California's coast is home to nearly 700 different kinds of seaweed, nearly all of which are edible. But when you walk into the average grocery store it's most often one variety that you find on the shelf, imported nori.
Seaweed is also a crucial ingredient in coastal ecosystems. It provides food and habitat for marine species, purifies ocean water, and absorbs more carbon than land forests. It can even promote gut health.
So why aren't we eating more of it? And why aren't we cultivating a seaweed industry on our coastline?
KCRW reporting fellow Gabriela Glueck wanted to find out why this abundant local resource is taking so long to catch on. She traveled to this year's California Seaweed Festival in Eureka, where she found a group of determined entrepreneurs who are struggling with funding and confusing regulations.
Gabriela Glueck: Eureka’s waterfront was packed with people. There were workshops, panel discussions, and cooking demos inside and vendors set up in the parking lot. Seaweed farmers talked business. Kids splashed around in buckets, hands full of kelp. Artists sold ocean inspired pottery. And festival goers walked around nibbling on a huge variety of seaweed food products.
Justin Mojonnier: It's really good on, like, bagel and cream cheese. It's almost like a smoked salmon.
Gabriela Glueck: Justin is the Quality Assurance Manager and Science Coordinator at the Hog Island Oyster Company. Hog Island farms oysters and sells them at its five Northern California restaurants. While he is an oyster man at heart, Justin knows seaweed. That’s because in the world of aquaculture, seaweed and oysters go hand in hand. Seaweed is a natural purifier, acting kind of like a Brita filter for the ocean. With climate change causing problems like warming waters and ocean acidification, oysters are in need of a filter.
Justin Mojonnier: Oysters hatch super quickly. It only takes about 24 hours for those fertilized eggs to hatch, and during this time, they're really susceptible to things like ocean acidification. They put about 90% of their body weight into a new shell in those first 24 hours, and when the ocean's acidic, it makes it really hard for the oysters to build that shell.
Gabriela Glueck: More seaweed equals cleaner waters and better oysters, which is one of the reasons Hog Island decided to partner with Humboldt based seaweed farm, Sunken Seaweed in 2022. I met up with Justin again at the tail end of the festival to take a tour of the farm and learn more about what it takes to actually grow seaweed.
Justin Mojonnier: Drizzly day in Humboldt, typical Humboldt day.
Gabriela Glueck: Justin gave me the tour because Sunken Seaweed’s co-founders Torre Polizzi and Leslie Booher were preoccupied. They were giving birth to their 2nd child.
Justin Mojonnier: So this is all Torre’s operations. Here you can see it's a really small footprint, and it's only about 1000 square feet, but we were able to produce about 20,000 pounds of seaweed on this small plot a year.
Gabriela Glueck: Seaweed is a really productive crop, you don’t have to do much to grow a lot of it. Sunken Seaweed has been growing and selling seaweed for 7 years. They have a so-called land-based farm, a collection of hot tub sized tanks bubbling with seawater. Something folks in the seaweed world call ‘Tumble Culture.’
Justin Mojonnier: So you can kind of take a look. We have some large tanks here, circular tanks in the center, there's an air stone, kind of bubbling the seaweed. You can see it kind of tumbling in the culture, so it'll get lifted up by the bubbles, and then it'll kind of fall down the sides of the tanks and get swept up again, and you can kind of gets a gyration pattern there.
Gabriela Glueck: The tanks are just outside of Hog Island’s hatchery. Sunken Seaweed is able to make use of the oyster companies seawater intake permit. PVC tubes pump filtered sea water into the tanks. And this special formula of seawater and a little sunlight every once in a while is all the seaweed needs to grow.
Justin Mojonnier: Seawater is just coming in. There's no additives in seaweed aquaculture, which makes it super sustainable. The water just flows through the algae, sucks up the nutrients, and then it flows out cleaner than it was when we sucked it out of the bay
Gabriela Glueck: Watching the different colors and shapes of seaweed floating to the surface is kind of mesmerizing. It’s like a Pacific ocean cold seawater jacuzzi for plants.
Justin Mojonnier: So in this tank, right here, we have dulse. So this is Pacific dulse. They call it the bacon of the sea. It's super high in protein. It's like 20, 25% protein. And when you fry it, it gets a really savory, almost bacony, like taste.
Justin Mojonnier gives Gabriela Glueck a tour of the Sunken Seaweed farm, which each year produces 20,000 pounds of seaweed in circular tanks. Photo by Gabriela Glueck.
Gabriela Glueck: Turns out, dulse might also be a great snack for cows. Researchers at Oregon State University are studying the impact of adding Pacific dulse to cattle feed to help reduce methane emissions. Other seaweed species have already been shown to do the same thing. In addition to its land-based farm, Sunken Seaweed also has an open-ocean farm in Humboldt Bay. That’s where they grow bull kelp. It needs a bit more room to stretch.
Justin Mojonnier: So they have long lines set up just down the bay, a couple docks down.
Gabriela Glueck: Warming waters have devastated California’s bull kelp forests… and some of Sunken Seaweed’s harvest goes towards restoration efforts. The rest is turned into products like cattle feed and biostimulants to help plants grow. You can also make a great pickle with bull kelp - firmer than a cucumber, decisively crunchy, and supposedly really good with a cold beer.
Despite its promise, Sunken Seaweed is one of the very few farms that have even been able to get their kelp lines in California waters. Acquiring the permits needed to start a seaweed farm in state waters is a challenging, expensive, time-consuming process with no guarantees.
In Humboldt Bay, things are a bit easier. The Humboldt Harbor Conservation and Recreation District is one of the few local entities that have tried to streamline permitting. The Port has agreed to conduct the state environmental review process so farmers don’t have to. But outside of a handful of local jurisdictions, getting a permit to farm seaweed in the ocean is no easy task.
Part of the problem is that the existing regulations to get a lease in state waters were designed for shellfish farms, not seaweed farms.
While other coastal states like Maine and Alaska have roughly 80 farms between them, you can count the number of California seaweed farms on just one hand. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife hasn’t granted a new water bottom lease for seaweed or shellfish in three decades.
Jules Marsh ran headfirst into this reality back in 2017.
Along with her co-founder Melissa Hanson, Jules had wanted to start a seaweed farm. When they realized how long permitting would take, they redirected their company, Kelpful, towards food, wild harvesting, and education.
Soon enough, they started selling seaweed at San Luis Obispo farmers markets.
Jules Marsh: People were like, I don't know what any of this is. What's grape stone like, I'd never seen this before.
Gabriela Glueck: That’s Jules. And as she tells it, her first farmers market venture made one thing pretty clear: people just don’t know a ton about seaweed. So, the question is, how do you market it? How do you get Americans to eat more seaweed?
Jules and her business partner realized they needed to come up with something accessible. That’s how Sea Sprinkles were born: a savory, umami seasoning blend. The play on furikake was an instant success at the farmers market. Soon enough, stores started reaching out.
A local grocery began stocking their Sea Sprinkles. Kelpful also branched out into bath salts and soaps which Whole Foods eventually picked up in 2022. Then Kelpful started gearing up to launch its newest snack product: seaweed-flavored popcorn.
Jules Marsh: The biggest challenge actually in the food realm for us is, how do you market this as not an Asian product? Because… when you're talking to the stores, like, what space are you filling? What is the white space? Because if you're like, here is this seasoning that's going to sit next to all the other furikakes that's going to go in the Asian apartment. There isn't room on the shelf for that.
This kelp hatchery workshop demonstrates ways that seaweed can be put to use, like adding it to cattle feed to help reduce methane emissions. Photo by Gabriela Glueck.
Gabriela Glueck: With buzzwords on the label like eco friendly, climate positive, and women-owned, Jules thought they had a winner. They were ready to expand.
Jules Marsh: People would get really excited about what we had in our product and what we were doing, and like, oh, the seaweed industry is so cool, and all this stuff. But when it actually came down to writing a check, we couldn't get those checks.
Gabriela Glueck: Jules looked for investors who also wanted to help the environment. But that just didn’t pan out.
Jules Marsh: So even people that are calling themselves, quote, unquote, impact investors, they're really just venture capitalists who want to put their money into what they think is a good cause, but they still want to see that return. They're still expecting this to be something like tech… This is food, this is agriculture.
Gabriela Glueck: Kelpful closed its doors this year, adding its name to a growing list of seaweed companies that have gone under. According to Phyconomy, a database that tracks the seaweed economy, investment in the industry took a sharp downturn in 2023. For a seaweed lover like Jules, it can all feel crushing.
Jules Marsh: Five days before the California seaweed Festival last year, I had moved everything that we had left into a storage unit, and I filled my car with whatever product that I had left and drove down to the seaweed festival. I couldn't even afford to have my own booth at an event that we have been a part of planning and hosting for the last five years. I had to share a booth with a friend of mine because I couldn't afford to be there.
Gabriela Glueck: The seaweed industry’s breakthrough may not come from packaged foods. But there might be another way in. Americans consume a third of all their seafood at restaurants. Seaweed evangelists think if we can get chefs to use more seaweed in their cooking, Americans might be inspired to use it at home.
At least that’s what Hog Island’s Culinary Director, Lauren Kiino, hopes. I stopped by her kitchen in Petaluma and she cooked me up a batch of lightly-coated and deep-fried seaweed crisps.
Lauren Kiino of Hog Island Oyster Co. incorporates seaweed into dishes, exposing diners to the underappreciated ingredient. Photo by Gabriela Glueck.
Lauren Kiino: It looks like this really, like, nice crispy, like, green thing you want to just snack on. And once you try it, you kind of just keep eating it…. And I think this is, we kind of think of it as, like, a gateway, like, fried seaweed is a gateway to people eating more sea vegetables.
Gabriela Glueck: Lauren is Japanese American and she grew up eating seaweed. At Hog Island, she’s trying to use seaweed in non-traditional ways.
Lauren Kiino: I would use it as a little bit… folded into some with some cheese, to use as a ravioli filling or something like that.
Gabriela Glueck: Or in a compound butter for grilled oysters.
Lauren Kiino: So it's fresh miso, ginger, garlic, and also some of the nori that's mixed into butter, and we use that as a topping on our grilled oysters, and it's super delicious. Becomes the sum of its parts.
Gabriela Glueck: Think smooth and velvety, with a mellow umami flavor so mouthwatering you go back in with a spoon.
Lauren Kiino: And then we also use nori for a citrus seasoning… it's basically just nori flakes mixed with dehydrated red Fresno peppers, citrus. And then we use that as a topping on some salads, or like a crudo. It's a little bit spicy, little bit citrusy, and you get that really nice umami saltiness from the nori.
Gabriela Glueck: These locally grown seaweed-infused dishes are reaching a considerable audience. More than 1,000 people a day eat at Hog Island’s five restaurants.
Sunken Seaweed’s partnership with Hog Island is a great example of the kind of collaboration that could help California’s seaweed industry take off. But for now, the promise of a coastline dotted with seaweed farms seems distant.
You probably won’t see fresh dulse, ogo or bull kelp next to the cilantro on your Whole Foods run. But the seaweed enthusiasts I met at the annual California Seaweed Festival, are not ready to give up on a nutritious, climate-positive food source so quickly.
Music thanks in part to Blue Dot Sessions.